A school history of England

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Emery Walker sc.

EX BIBLIOTHECA
FRANCES A. YATES

A SCHOOL HISTOEY
OF ENGLAND

BY

C. It. L. FLETCHER

AND

RUDYARD KIPLING
PICTURES BY HENRY FORD

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

1911

I

COPYRIGHT 1911 by C. R. L. Fletcher and
Rudyard Kipling. All rights, including the right
to reprint the poems in this volume, or any portions
of them, are strictly reserved by the authors.

LONDON

HENRY FROWDE HODDER & STOUGHTON

AMEN CORNER WARWICK SQUARE

E. C« E. C»

PREFACE

This book is written for all boys and
girls who are interested in the story of Great
Britain and her Empire.

C. R. L. F.
R. K.

March, 1911.

A 2

The publishers desire to express their thanks
to the Manager and officials of the United Services
Museum, Whitehall, for their courtesy in giving
facilities to the artist for making studies of the
military and naval material in the museum.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

L From the Earliest Times to the Departure

of the Romans ..... 9

II. Saxon England ...... 26

III. The Norman Kings, 1066-1154 ... 47

IV. Henry II to Henry III, 1154-1272 ; the

Beginnings of Parliament ... 62

V. The Three Edwards, 1272-1377 . . 83

VI. The End of the Middle Ages ; Richard II

to Richard III, 1377-1485 . . 97

VII. The Tudors and the Awakening of Eng-
land, 1485-1603 Ill

VIII. The Early Stuarts and the Great Civil

War, 1603-1660 140

IX. The Fall of the Stuarts and the Revo-
lution, 1660-1688 .... 163

X. William III to George II, 1688-1760;

the Growth of Empire . . . 177

XI. The American Rebellion and the Great
French War, 1760-1815; Reign of
George III ...... 199

XII. George III to George V, 1815-1911 . 220

POEMS

PAGE

The River's Tale 9

The Roman Centurion 19

The Pirates in England 26

The Saxon Foundations of England 31

What ' Dane-geld ' means 39

William the Conqueror's Work 46

Norman and Saxon 51

The Reeds of Runny mede 75

My Father's Chair 81

The Dawn Wind 109

The King's Job . . . . . Ill

With Drake in the Tropics .... ... 134

'Together' 138

Before Edgehill Fight . . .155

The Dutch in the Medway 168

4 Brown Bess ' 177

* ;Twas not while England's Sword unsheathed ' 199

After the War 202

The French Wars 218

The Bells and the Queen, 1911 222

Big Steamers . . . 235

The Secret of the Machines 247

The Glory of the Garden 249

1

LIST OF COLOURED PLATES

The Cave People To face page 11

The Landing of the Danes „ 37

William I at Hastings „ 43

Richard I in the Holy Land . . . . ,, „ 70

Edward III at Calais „ „ 94

Richard IT and Wat Tyler „ 99

An Imaginary Map of America, 1500 . . . After 1 <>0

With Drake in the Tropics To face page 134

Prince Rupert at Oxford, going to battle . ,, ,, 156

Waterloo, 7 p.m., June 18, 1815 .... „ ,, 217

A Glimpse of the Future ,, 248

LIST OF DRAWINGS

PAGE

The Landing of the Romans 17

The Building of the Wall 23

St. Augustine preaching to Ethelbert 34

The Murder of Becket . . .67

King John signs the Great Charter 74

Edward I's Wars with the Welsh — how the King shared the

hardships of his men 84

English Archery wins at Agincourt 101

How Henry VIII had the Monks turned out of the Monasteries 119

Henry VIII sees that England has a good Fleet . . .122

At the time of the Armada — Elizabeth reviews the Troops at

Tilbury 135

Brown Bess . . . 1 78

Nelson shot at the Battle of Trafalgar, October 21, 1S05 . . 213

LIST OF MAPS

Britain, to illustrate history from the Coming of the Romans

to the Norman Conquest 25

France 93

Great Britain, to illustrate history from the Norman Conquest

to the present day 142

Ireland . .152

British Colonial Empire after the Treaty of Utrecht, 1713 . 187

Western Europe

The World, showing the British Empire ... J

\End

papers

CHAPTER I

FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE
DEPARTURE OF THE ROMANS

The River's Tale.

Twenty bridges from Tower to Keiv
Wanted to know ichat the River knew,
For they were young and the Thames teas old.
And this is the tale that the River told: —

1 1 walk my beat before London Town,

Five hours up and seven down.

Up I go and I end my run

At Tide-end-town, which is Teddington.

Down I come with the mud in my hands

And plaster it over the Map] in Sands.

But I'd have you know that these waters of mine

Were once a branch of the River Rhine,

When hundreds of miles to the East I went

And England was joined to the Continent.

I remember the bat-winged lizard-birds,
The Age of Ice and the mammoth herds,
And the giant tigers that stalked them down
Through Regent's Park into Camden Town.
And I remember like yesterday
The earliest Cockney who came my way,
When he pushed through the forest that lined the
Strand,

With paint on his face and a club in his hand.

He was death to feather and fin and fur,

He trapped my beavers at Westminster,

He netted my salmon, he hunted my deer,

He killed my herons off Lambeth Pier ;

He fought his neighbour with axes and swords,

Flint or bronze, at my upper fords,

10

The British Islands

While down at Greenwich for slaves and tin

The tall Phoenician ships stole in,

And North Sea war-boats, painted and gay,

Flashed like dragon-flies Erith way ;

And Norseman and Negro and Gaul and Greek

Drank with the Britons in Barking Creek,

And life was gay, and the world was new,

And I was a mile across at Kew !

But the Roman came with a heavy hand,

And bridged and roaded and ruled the land,

And the Roman left and the Danes blew in —

And that s where your history books begin ! '

The land This is to be a short history of all the people who
we live m. ^aYe jjve(j jn Brftish Islands. I have just counted

up over a hundred of these islands on the map, some of
them mere rocks, some as big as small counties ; besides
England with Scotland, and Ireland. But when first
there were men in Britain it was not a group of islands,
but one stretch of land joining the great continent of
Europe, which then reached out into the Atlantic Ocean
more than fifty miles west of Ireland. The English
Channel, the North Sea and the Irish Sea were then land
through which ran huge European rivers. The land was
covered with forests and swamps, and full of wild beasts,
some of which have now vanished from the earth, while
others, such as the tiger and the elephant, have gone to
warmer climates. As for wolves, the land was alive
with them. Indeed, the last wolf in Scotland was killed
only 240 years ago ; the last in Ireland about 180 years
ago. The beaver was one of the commonest animals of
those early times, and perhaps helped to make our
flat meadows by the dams he built across the streams.

Biit Ave know almost nothing about the first men who
lived here, except that they were naked and very hairy ;

»

The Cave Men

11

they slept in trees and lived on raw flesh or fruit, or dug Perhaps
for roots with crooked branches. After a long while, pro- ye'ars°ago.
bably thousands of years, the climate got gradually colder, The first
and great sheets of ice covered all Northern Europe.
Then these first men either died out or went away south-
wards. Again thousands of years passed, and the west
end of Europe got freed of ice and sank several hundred
feet, and the sea flooded over the lower parts. So
Britain became an island or a group of islands.

Then the second race of men came, perhaps in some Perhaps
kind of boats made of skins stretched over bent poles, years°ago.
About this race we do know something. They were Tne Cave

men.

jolly, cunning, dark little fellows with long black hair.

At first they lived high up on the hills, so that they could

see their enemies from a distance. They could cook

food, they dug out caves to live in, they made arrows and

axes of sharp stones, and so stood a very fair chance of

killing the wild beasts. Their brains, though perhaps

small compared to ours, were worth all the strength of

all the beasts that ever howled at night. No doubt they

had still something of the beast in them ; they could run

very swiftly ; could climb trees like monkeys ; could smell

their enemies and their prey far off. They grew up early

and died young. Most of their children died in infancy.

They clothed themselves in skins, and at first lived Life of the

entirely by hunting and fishing. Their whole time Cavemen-

was devoted to getting food for themselves and their

families. But just think what a lot of things they had

to make for themselves. How long it must have taken

to polish a piece of flint until it was sharp enough to

cut down a tree or to cut up a tough old wolf ! How

long to make a fish-hook or a needle of bone ! How

clever and hard-working these men must have been !

12

The British Islands

No doubt there were a few sneaks and lazy wretches
then, as there are now, who tried to beg from other
people instead of fighting for themselves and their
wives. But I fancy such fellows had a worse time of
it then than they have now. A man who wouldn't
work very soon died.

No doubt there were holidays, too, after a successful
hunt ; or long lazy summer days, when it was too hot
to go out after deer or bison, and when even the women
laid aside their everlasting skin-stitching and told each
other stories of their babies ; and the babies toddled
about after butterflies, larger and brighter than the
peacocks and tortoiseshells of to-day. I don't suppose
that these men thought of Britain as their 6 country ' ;
but they thought of their family or their tribe as some-
thing sacred, for which they would fight and die ; and
the spirit of the good land took hold of them, the smell
of the good damp mother-earth, the hum of the wild
bees, the rustle of heather and murmur of fern ; they
made rude songs about it, and carved pictures of their
fights on the shoulder-blades of the beasts they had
killed. As time went on they grew still more cunning,
and began to tame the young of some of the beasts, such
as puppies, lambs, calves and kids ; and they found out
the delights of a good drink of milk. And so to the
hunting trade they added the shepherd's trade, which
is a much more paying one. Then some wonderful
fellow discovered how to sow seeds of wheat, or some
other corn ; and that these, when ripened, gathered
and ground to powder, made a delicious food, which
we call bread. When that was found out real civiliza-
tion began ; for a third trade was added, that of
agriculture, the most paying of all.

The Cave Men

13

So one by one the earth gave up her secrets to our Their
forefathers, and, like Adam and Eve, they went forth tribes'
to subdue and replenish this Isle of Britain. Each
century that passed, they lived longer, were better fed,
better housed, used better weapons, killed off more wild
beasts. They quarrelled of course, and even killed each
other ; family often fought with family, tribe with tribe,
for they were always breaking the Tenth Commandment.
But such quarrels were not perpetual ; tribe might
often join with tribe, and so begin to form one nation
or people. How they were governed, what their laws
and customs were, what their religious ideas were, we
can only guess. Perhaps the eldest man of the tribe Their
was a sort of king and declared what were the 1 customs ' kmss-
which the tribe must keep ; said ' this would make the
gods angry 1 and that would not ; settled the dis-
putes about a sheep or piece of corn-land ; led the
tribe to fight in battle. Perhaps this king pretended
to be descended from the gods, and his tribe got to
believe it.

Who wrere the gods ? Sun, moon, stars, rivers, trees, Their
lakes ; the rain, the lightning, the clouds ; perhaps cer- gods*
tain animals ; dead ancestors, if they had been brave
men, would come to be counted gods. But all round
you were gods and spirits of some sort, whom you must
appease by sacrifices, or by absurd customs. 6 Do not
cut your hair by moonlight, or the goddess of the moon
will be angry/ 6 If you are the king, never cut your
hair at all.' i Luck ' perhaps was the origin of many
of such customs ; some famous man had once cut his
hair by moonlight, and next day he had been struck
by lightning. Then there were priests, or c medicine-
men 9 of some kind. These would generally support the

14 The British Islands

king ; but they would often bully him also, and try to

make him enforce absurd customs.

Their And so the ages rolled along, and these 1 Cave men 9

buildings. Qr < gtone Age men , began tQ thin the foregts a little?

or took advantage of the clearings caused by forest
fires. They began to come down from the hill-tops, on
which their earliest homes had been made, into the
valleys. They began to come out of their caves, and
began to build themselves villages of little wooden
huts ; they began to make regular beaten track-ways
along the slopes of the downs ; they began, perhaps, to
raise huge stone temples to their heathen gods. Was
it they who built Stonehenge, whose ruins, even now,
strike us with wonder and terror ?
Their Tribe began to exchange its goods with tribe ; the

foreign-1^1 flints of Sussex for the deer horns of Devon, for deer
ers» horns make excellent pickaxes. Foreign traders came

too, to buy the skins of the wild animals, also perhaps
to buy slaves. Our ancestors were quite willing to sell
their fellow men, captives taken in war from other
tribes. What these foreigners brought in return is not
very clear ; perhaps only toys and ornaments, such as
Ave now sell to savages ; perhaps casks of strong drink ;
perhaps a few metal tools and weapons. For in Southern
Europe men had now begun to make tools and weapons
of bronze ; the day of stone axes was nearly over. So
by degrees the Stone Age men of Britain learned that
there were richer and more civilized men than them-
selves living beyond the seas, who had things which
they lacked ; and, as they coveted such things, they
had to make or catch something to buy them with.
Therefore they bred more big dogs, killed and skinned
more deer, caught more slaves. So trade began in

4

The Celts

15

Britain, and its benefits came first to those dwellers of
the southern and south-eastern coasts who were nearest
to the ports of Europe.

But the foreign traders also took home with them Perhaps
the report that Britain looked a fertile country, and ^0years
was quite worth conquering. And so, perhaps about Comin<*
a thousand years before Christ, a set of new tribes of the

Celts

began to cross the Channel, and to land in our islands,
not as traders, but as fighters. Terrible big fellows
they were, with fair hair, and much stronger than
the Stone Age men. They were armed, too, with this
new-fangled bronze, which made short work of our
poor little bows and flint-tipped arrows and spears.
Those of us who were not killed or made slaves at once,
fled to the forests, fled ever northwards or westwards,
or hid in our caves again. But many of us were made
slaves, especially the women, some of whom afterwards
married their conquerors. The Celts, for that was the
name of the new people, seized all the best land, all
the flocks and herds, and all the strong places on the
hill-tops, and began to lead in Britain the life which
they had been leading for several centuries in the
country we now call France. From these Celts the
Scottish, Irish and Welsh people are mainly descended.

They rode on war-ponies, and, like the Assyrians in Life of the
the Bible, they drove war-chariots ; they knew, or were Celts-
soon taught by foreign traders, how to dig in the earth
for minerals, and they soon did a large trade in that
valuable metal, tin, which is found in Cornwall. They
were in every way more civilized than the Stone Age
men ; their gods were fiercer and stronger ; their
priests, called Druids, more powerful ; their tribes were
much larger and better organized for war. Their

16 The British Islands

methods of hunting and fishing, of agriculture, of sheep
and cow breeding, were much better ; their trade with
their brothers in France was far greater. Before they,
in their turn, were conquered, they had found out the
use of iron for tools and weapons. Flint had gone down
before bronze ; so now bronze, which is a soft metal
and takes time to make, rapidly went down before the
cheap and hard grey iron. He who has the best tools
will win in the fight with Nature ; he wrho has the best
weapons will beat his fellow men in battle.

Meanwhile, far away in the East, great empires had
been growing up and decaying for six or seven thousand
years. Each contributed something to civilization,
Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece ; each in turn
made a bid for conquering and civilizing the 'known
world \ But the world that they knew stretched little
beyond the warm and tideless Mediterranean Sea. After
all these arose the mighty empire of Rome, the heiress
and conqueror of all these civilizations and empires.
Home brought to her task a genius for war and govern-
ment which none of them had known. The Roman
armies had passed in conquest into Spain, into France,
and from France they passed to Britain. The greatest
of Roman soldiers, Caius Julius Caesar, who was
conquering the Celts in France, landed somewhere in
Kent, about fifty years before Christ's birth. He found
it a tough job to struggle up to the Thames, which
he crossed a little above London ; tough, almost as
much because of the forests as because of the valiant
Britons, although in the open field these were no
match for the disciplined Roman regiments called
1 legions It is this Caesar who wrote the first account
of our island and our people which has come down to us.

The Roman Invasion 17

He was very much astonished at the tide which he found
in the Channel ; and his book leaves us with the impres-

THE LANDING OF THE ROMANS

sion that the spirit of the dear motherland had breathed
valour and cunning in defence into the whole British
people.

1134 B

18 The British Islands

Second
Roman
Invasion
A.D. 43.

The

Roman

Conquest.

The Peace
that Rome
gave.

For ninety years after his raid no Roman armies came
to the island. But Roman traders came and Romanized
Celts from France, who laughed at the ' savage ' ways of
the British Celts. Men began to talk, In the wooden or
wattle huts of British kings (hitherto believed by the
Britons to be the most magnificent buildings imaginable),
of the name and fame of the great Empire, of streets paved
with marble, and of houses roofed with gilded bronze ;
of the invincible Roman legions clad in steel and moving
like steel machines ; of the great paved roads driven like
arrows over hill and dale, through the length and breadth
of Western Europe, of the temples and baths, of the
luxurious waterways of the South. Rome attracted and
terrified many peoples, even before she conquered them.
The Roman Emperor seemed to men who had never
seen him to be a very god upon earth.

But the Roman conquest began in earnest in the year
43, and within half a century was fairly complete. At
first it was cruel ; Roman soldiers were quite pitiless ;
for those who resisted they had only the sword or
slavery. The north and west of Britain resisted long
and hard and often. Once under the great Queen,
Boadicea, whose statue now stands on Westminster
Bridge in London, the Britons cut to pieces a whole
Roman legion. Then came cruel vengeance and recon-
quest ; but after reconquest came such peace and good
government as Britain had never seen before. The
Romans introduced into all their provinces a system of
law so fair and so strong, that almost all the best laws
of modern Europe have been founded on it. Every-
where the weak were protected against the strong ;
castles were built on the coast with powerful garrisons
in them ; fleets patrolled the Channel and the North

The Roman Conquest 19

Sea. Great roads crossed the island from east to
west and from north to south. Great cities, full of
all the luxuries of the South, grew up. Temples were
built to the Roman gods; and country-houses of rich
Roman gentlemen, of which you may still see the remains
here and there. These gentlemen at first talked about
exile, shivered and cursed the * beastly British climate
heated their houses with hot air, and longed to get home
to Italy. But many stayed ; their duty or their business
obliged them to stay : and into them too the spirit of
the dear motherland entered, and became a passion.
Their children, perhaps, never saw Rome ; but Rome
and Britain had an equal share of their love and devo-
tion, and they, perhaps, thought something like this : —

The Roman Centurion speaks :
Legate, I had the news last night. My cohort 's ordered A Roman

home soldier

By ship to Portus Itius and thence by road to Rome. Britain 68
I've marched the companies aboard, the arms are

stowed below :
Now let another take my sword. Command me not to go !

I've served in Britain forty years, from Yectis to the Wall
I have none other home than this, nor any life at all.
Last night I did not understand, but, now the hour
draws near

That calls me to my native land, I feel that land is here.

Here where men say my name was made, here where my

work was done,
Here where my dearest dead are laid — my wife — my wife

and son ;

Here where time, custom, grief and toil, age, memory,
service, love,

Have rooted me in British soil. Ah, how shall I remove ?

B 2

20 The British Islands

For me this land, that sea, these airs, those folk and
fields suffice.

What purple Southern pomp can match our changeful

Northern skies,
Black with December snows unshed or pearled with

August haze,

The clanging arch of steel-grey March, or June's long-
lighted days ?

You'll follow widening Rhodanus till vine and olive lean
Aslant before the sunny breeze that sweeps Nemausus
clean

To Arelate's triple gate ; but let me linger on,
Here where our stiff-necked British oaks confront
Euroclydon !

You'll take the old Aurelian Road through shore-
descending pines

Where, blue as any peacock's neck, the Tyrrhene Ocean
shines.

You'll go where laurel crowns are won, but will you e'er
forget

The scent of hawthorn in the sun, or bracken in the wet ?

Let me work here for Britain's sake — at any task you
will—

A marsh to drain, a road to make or native troops to
drill.

Some Western camp (I know the Pict) or granite Border
keep,

Mid seas of heather derelict, where our old messmates
sleep.

Legate, I come to you in tears — My cohort ordered
home !

I've served in Britain forty years. What should I do in
Rome?

Here is my heart, my soul, my mind — the only life I
know. —

I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go !

Rome's Failure

21

And peace was imposed all over Southern Britain ; Mixture
and the legions came to be stationed only on the frontier, ancPntlS
and hardly ever moved. No doubt at first these legions Roman
were recruited from all the regions over which Rome
ruled ; and she ruled from Euphrates to Tyne, from
Rhine to Africa. Soon, however, they must have been
recruited in Britain itself and from Britons. Celtic
mothers bore British sons to Roman fathers, and crooned
Celtic songs over the cradles of babies, who would one
day carry the Roman flag. The beautiful Latin tongue,
which the Romans had brought with them, was enriched
with many Celtic words.

It was, however, a misfortune for Britain that Rome What
never conquered the whole island. The great warrior, to
Agricola, did, between a.d. 79 and 85, penetrate far do.
into Scotland ; but he could leave no traces of civiliza-
tion behind him, and Ireland he never touched at all.
So Ireland never went to school, and lias been a spoilt
child ever since ; the most charming of children, indeed,
full of beautiful laughter and tender tears, full of poetry
and valour, but incapable of ruling herself, and im-
patient of all rule by others. Then there was always a
i Scottish frontier ' to be guarded, and along this frontier
the Emperor Hadrian, early in the second century, began
the famous Roman Wall. His successors improved on it The
until it became a mighty rampart of stone, eighty miles ^i}an
long, from Tyne to Solway, with ditches in front and
behind and a strong garrison kept in its watch-towers.

To the north of the wall roamed, almost untouched,
certainly unsubdued, the w ilder Celts whom the Romans
called ' Picts ' or painted men ; the screen of the wall
seemed a perfectly sufficient defence against these. But
prosperity and riches are often bad for men ; they lead

22

The British Islands

to the neglect of defence. I fear that Roman Britain
went to sleep behind her wall, recruiting fell off, the
strength of the legions became largely a 6 paper strength'.

And not only in Britain. The greatest empire that
the world has ever seen was slowly dying at the heart,
dying of too much power, too much prosperity, too much
luxury. What a lesson for us all to-day ! There were
pirates abroad, who smelt plunder afar off, land-thieves
and sea-thieves. They began to break through the
frontiers. One fine day the terrible news came to York,
the capital of Roman Britain, that the Picts were over
the wall. Where was the commander-in-chief? Oh !
he was at Bath, taking the waters to cure his indiges-
tion. Where was the prefect (the highest representative
of the Emperor) ? Oh ! he lived at Lyons in Southern
France ; for he governed France as well as Britain.
Quite possibly he was actually in rebellion against the
Emperor of Rome, and was thinking of marching down
to Italy to make himself Emperor ! If so, he would be
for withdrawing the few soldiers that were left in Britain
instead of sending more to defend it. 6 A few barbarians
more or less over the wall ' mattered very little to a man
who lived by neglecting his duties in Southern France ;
i they could easily be driven back next year.'

But it soon came to be less easy, and the barbarians
soon came to be more than a few. An officer, called the
* Count of the Saxon Shore \ was created to w atch against
the pirates. The cities of Britain, hitherto undefended
by fortifications, hastily began to run up walls for them-
selves. One day even these walls were in vain. Rome,
Britain and civilization were equally coming to an end,
and it would be long before they revived. Half a
century had completed the Roman conquest of the

THE BUILDING OF THE WALL

24 The British Islands

island ; two and a half centuries of happy peace had

followed, in another half-century it was all over. Long

before the last Roman legions were withdrawn in 407,

pirates had been breaking down all the walls and

The defences of Britain. Celtic Picts from the North, Celtic

pirates1 Scots from Ireland ; worse than all, dozen the north-

fram east ivind came terrible 6 Englishmen ' Saxons from

Germany, the shores of North Germany and Denmark. Rome had

aboUorn forced the wolf and the eagle to content themselves
a. d. 350- . G

450. with rabbits and lambs ; now they were going to feast
once more upon the corpses of men.

25

54

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CHAPTER II

SAXON ENGLAND
The Pirates in England.

When Rome was rotten-ripe to her fall,
And the sceptre passed from her hand,

The pestilent Picts leaped over the wall
To harry the British land.

The little dark men of the mountain and waste,

So quick to laughter and tears,
They came panting with hate and haste

For the loot of five hundred years.

They killed the trader, they sacked the shops,

They ruined temple and town —
They swept like wolves through the standing crops

Crying that Rome was down.

They wiped out all that they could find

Of beauty and strength and worth,
Rut they could not wipe out the Viking's Wind,

That brings the ships from the North.

They could not wipe out the North-East gales,

Nor what those gales set free —
The pirate ships with their close-reefed sails,

Leaping from sea to sea.

They had forgotten the shield-hung hull

Seen nearer and more plain,
Dipping into the troughs like a gull,

And gull-like rising again —

The painted eyes that glare and frown,

In the high snake-headed stem,
Searching the beach while her sail comes down,

They had forgotten them !

The British Christians

21

There was no Count of the Saxon Shore

To meet her hand to hand,
As she took the beach with a surge and a roar,

And the pirates rushed inland.

Early in the fourth century the Roman Empire had The
become Christian. And among the benefits Rome had QhrisSh
brought to Britain was the preaching of the Gospel, tians.
We know very little about the old British Church,
except the names of several martyrs who died for the
faith before the conversion of the Empire. One of
these was the soldier, St. Alban, to whom the greatest
abbey in England was afterwards dedicated. It is
probable, however, that, as in other parts of the Roman
Empire, Britain was divided into bishoprics, churches
were built, and heathen temples pulled down.

Our English and Saxon friends, when they first landed The
in Kent and Eastern Britain, were violent — you might g^omT
almost say conscientious — heathens. They feared and and

English

hated Christianity and all other traces of Roman civiliza- &
tion ; and they rooted out everything Roman that they
could lay hands on. Other provinces of the Empire, Italy,
France and Spain, Mere also being overrun by bar-
barians, but none of these were as remorseless and
destructive as the Saxons. Therefore, in Italy, France
and Spain, the ' re-making 9 of nations on the ruins of
Rome began fairly soon, but not in Britain. The
Saxons made a clean sweep of the eastern half of the
island, from the Forth to the Channel and westwards
to the Severn. An old British chronicle gives us a
hint of the awful thoroughness with which they worked.
6 Some therefore of the miserable remnant (of Britons)
being taken in the mountains were murdered in great

28

Saxon England

numbers, others constrained by famine came and yielded
themselves to be slaves for ever to their foes, running
the risk of being instantly slain, which truly was the
greatest favour that could be offered them : others passed
beyond the seas with loud lamentations/

The Saxons brought their wives and children with
them, though it is difficult to believe that they were so
stupid as to kill all the Britons instead of enslaving
them and marrying their wives. Yet, if they had not
done this, surely there would have been some traces left
of Latin or Celtic speech, law and religion. But there
were practically none. When, in the eighth and ninth
centuries, we begin to see a little into the darkness, we
find that England has become a purely English country,
with a purely English and rather absurd system of law,
and a purely English language ; while, as for religion, the
people have to be converted all over again by a special
mission from the Pope at Rome.

Probably the British made a very desperate defence,
and were only slowly beaten westwards into Wales,
Lancashire, Devon and Cornwall. Something like two
centuries passed before the English were thorough
masters of the eastern half of the island. And all that
while Roman temples, churches, roads and cities were
crumbling away and grass was growing over their ruins.
Studying the history of those days is like looking at
a battle-field in a fog. As the fog clears we get some
notion of our dear barbarian forefathers.

The Saxon Englishman was a savage, with the vices
and cruelties of an overgrown boy ; a drunkard and
a gambler, and very stupid. But he was a truth-teller,
a brave, patient, and cool-headed fellow. A Roman
historian describes him as a free-necked man married

Life of the Saxons

29

to a white-armed woman who can hit as hard as horses
kick He honoured his women and he loved his home ;
and the spirit of the land entered into him, even more
than into any of those who lived before or came after
him. He never knew when he was beaten, and so he
took a lot of beating. He was not quarrelsome by
nature, and, indeed, when he had once settled down in
Britain, he was much too apt, as his descendants are
to-day, to neglect soldiering altogether. He forgot his
noble trade of sailor, which had brought him to
Britain, so completely that within two centuries his
coasts were at the mercy of every sea-thief in Europe ;
and down the north-east wind the sea-thieves were
always coming. England should always beware of the
north-east wind. It blows her no good.

Tilling the fields was the Saxon's real job ; he wTas The
a plough-boy and a cow-boy by nature, and like a true
plough- and cow-boy he was always grumbling. He boy.0
hated being governed ; he always stood up for his
6 rights ', and often talked a lot of nonsense about them.
He obeyed his kings when he pleased, which was not
often, and these kings had very little power over him.
But he loved his land, and he grubbed deep into it
with his clumsy plough. In the sweat of his brow he
ate the bread and pork and drank the beer (too much
of the beer) which he raised on it.

Every English village could keep itself to itself, since a Sax<
it produced nearly everything its people wanted, except Vlllase
salt, iron and millstones, which could only be found in
certain favoured places. In most villages there was
a sort of squire called a c thegn who pafd some-
tliing, either a rent or a service of some kind, to
a king or to a bigger thegn, and owned much more

Saxon England

land than the ordinary freemen. Probably also he
owned a few slaves, whether of English or British birth.
There was also a smith and a miller, a swineherd to
take the village pigs into the forest to feed, a shepherd
and a cowherd, and a doctor who would be more or less
of a wizard. After the conversion to Christianity in the
seventh century there was also in most villages a priest.
Of the freemen, every head of a family owned certain
strips of land on which he grew corn, and each helped
his neighbour to plough the land with teams of oxen.
There was also a great common on which all freemen
could pasture their cattle, and a wood wherein the pigs
fed. There were few horses — there was no hay to feed
them on — cows were only killed for food when they were
too old to draw the plough, sheep were chiefly kept for
wool, and so the pig was the real friend of hungry
men.

The small There was in each district some sort of rude govern-
kfng-n nient by some sort of rude king, whose ancestor may have
doms. been a leading pirate of the first ship-load of Saxons who
landed near that place. No doubt many tiny ' kingdoms '
sprang up, as ship-load after ship-load of pirates ex-
plored and settled inland. Probably the first ' king-
doms' extended as far as an armed man could walk
before a days honest fighting, but these would naturally
melt into, or be conquered into larger territories. In the
seventh century there were at least seven little king-
doms, but, by the eighth, only three of any importance
remained.

The three Northumbria, stretching from the Forth to the
S^ixoi Humber, and westwards to the hills that part Cumber-
king- land and Lancashire from Yorkshire and Northum-
doms. berlanci

Saxon Government

31

2. Mercia, or Middle England, reaching from the
Humber to the Thames and westward to the Severn.

3. Wessex, comprising all south of the Thames and
as far west as Devon.

When they were tired of fighting the Britons the kings
of these small kingdoms constantly fought each other.

There were laws, or rather deeply-rooted 6 customs Their
mostly connected with fighting, or cows or ploughing, men™"
There were rude courts of justice, which would fine their

r -i • o gods.

a man so many sheep or so many silver pennies tor
murder or wounding or cow-stealing. The king had
a council of ' wise men', who met in his wooden house
to advise him, and to drink with him afterwards at his
rude feasts. There were gods, called Tiu and Woden
and Thor and Freya, from whom our Tuesday, Wednes-
day, Thursday and Friday are derived. They lived in
a heaven called Valhalla, where, our ancestors thought,
there was an endless feast of pork and strong ale with
no headaches to follow.

All this, as you see, was a barbarous business, after A barbar-
the well-organized, civilized Roman life ; but at least it don/.™6
was a life with a good deal of freedom in it. Rome
had stifled freedom too much ; the Saxons went to the
other extreme. It is quite possible to have too much
freedom, and you will see what a price these Saxons,
before the end of their six hundred years of freedom,
had to pay for theirs.

After the sack of the City when Rome was sunk to The

a name> Iaun°da.

In the years when the lights were darkened, or ever tionsof
St. Wilfred came, England.
Low on the borders of Britain (the ancient poets sing)
Between the cliff and the forest there ruled a Saxon
King.

32 Saxon England

Stubborn were all his people from cottar to overlord,
Not to be cowed by the cudgel, scarce to be schooled
by the sword,

Quick to turn at their pleasure, cruel to cross in their
mood,

And set on paths of their choosing as the hogs of
Andred's Wood.

Laws they made in the Witan, the laws of flaying and
fine —

Common, loppage and pannage, the theft and the track
of kine,

Statutes of tun and of market for the fish and the malt
and the meal,

The tax on the Bramber packhorse, and the tax on the
Hastings keel.

Over the graves of the Druids and under the wreck of
Rome,

Rudely but surely they bedded the plinth of the days
to come.

Behind the feet of the Legions and before the Normans' ire,
Rudely but greatly begat they the bones of state and of
shire ;

Rudely but deeply they laboured, and their labour

stands till now,
If we trace on our ancient headlands the twist of their

eight-ox plough.

Growth of There was no king really powerful enough to rule
fand- whole island. In a land of forest and swamp, where

owners. roads hardly exist for eight months of the year, it must
always be difficult for armed men, judges or traders to
pass from place to place, except on horseback ; and
the Saxons were no great horse-soldiers. I think we
shall see that it was the knight and his horse, who, from
the eleventh century onwards, first made the rule of
one king possible over the whole island. Meanwhile,

The Saxons become Christian 33

the 6 great men ' of the Saxons, ' thegns ', 1 aldermen %
6 earls', or whatever they were called, took most of the
power, and naturally began to oppress their poorer
neighbours. They got the courts of justice into their
own hands ; they grabbed the land, they exacted rents
and services from the poorer landowners ; they made
what is called a ' feudal ' state of society. In the year
600 a free Kentish farmer might own 120 acres of land ;
in the year 1000 he seldom owned more than 30, and
for this he probably had to pay a heavy rent and to
labour on some great man's land.

The first rudiments of civilization were brought back The
to this barbarous England by the Christian missionaries become
whom Pope Gregory sent thither in the year 597. Christian
St. Augustine came and preached in Kent and became 597.
the first Archbishop of Canterbury. From Canterbury
missionaries spread all over the island, and, in a century,
the heathenism, that had rooted out Christianity two
hundred years before, was quite gone. It seems that the
fierce Saxon gods made a very poor fight of it. The Bishops
old Roman capital of York recovered its importance j^^g
and became an archbishopric. Some seventeen other
bishoprics arose all over the country, and, even more
important than the bishoprics, great abbeys and monas-
teries full of monks and nuns. A monk is a person who
retires from the world in order to devote himself to
prayer with a view to saving his own soul.

Besides preaching the true Gospel of Our Lord, these Gifts of
missionaries preached the worship of saints, and every landtotno

1 . monks.

church was dedicated to some particular saint, who was
believed to watch over its congregation. A gift of land
to a monastery was called ' a gift to God and His saints
If you were not holy enough to go into the monastery,

1131 C

34

Power of the Pope

35

the next best thing you could do, said the monks, was to
give your land to the saints. But this meant that you
neglected your worldly duties, such as defending your
country, tilling your fields, providing for your wife and
children. The world, in fact, was painted to our Saxon
ancestors by the monks as such a terribly wicked place,
that the best thing they could do was to get out of it as
quickly as possible. The Popes of Rome, who had about Power of
this time made themselves supreme heads of all Western tlie Pope-
Christendom, encouraged this view ; and the monks were
always devoted servants of the Popes. But there were
other priests who were not monks, and these usually
served the parish churches, which gradually but slowly
grew up in England ; they were always rather jealous of
the monks.

Human love and common sense were too strong to be Life of the
taken in altogether by this new unworldly spirit. Even mon s'
the monks themselves soon became very human, and, as
they had to eat and drink, they had to cultivate their
fields to raise food. Indeed, they soon began to do this
more intelligently than most people ; and so the monas-
teries became very rich. I think it is to the monks that
we English owe our strong love of gardening and flowers.
And also our love of fishing ; the Church said you were
to eat only fish and eggs in the season of Lent and on
other ' fast-days', and so every monastery, however far
from a river, had to have a fish-pond well stocked with
fish, or else live upon salt herrings, which were difficult
to get far inland. I always like to think of the dear old
monks, in their thick black woollen frocks with their
sleeves tucked up, watching their floats in the pond. I
hope they Avere always strictly truthful as to the size of
the fish which they hooked but did not land. The monks

36

Saxon England

Power of
the Kings
of North-
umbria,
630-750.

Kings of

Mercia,

750-800.

Egbert,
King of
Wessex,

802.

also kept alive what remains of learning there were : they
brought books from beyond the seas ; they taught
schools ; made musical instruments, were builders,
painters and craftsmen of all kinds ; and produced
famous men of learning like Bede and Wilfred. English
missionaries went from English abbeys to preach the
Gospel to heathen Germans. So rich and powerful did
the Church become, that in the councils of our tenth-
century kings the bishops and abbots were even more
important than the thegns and earls.

The Church then taught men much and tamed them a
little. It certainly helped towards uniting the jarring
kingdoms ; for Christian Northumbria, in the seventh
century, was the first to exercise a real sort of leadership
over the other kingdoms ; it was a Northumbrian king,
Edwin, who built and gave his name to Edinburgh ; it
was in the Northumbrian monastery of Jarrow that the
good monk Bede wrote the first history of England. You
may still see Bede's tomb in Durham Cathedral, with the
Latin rhyme on the great stone lid. The last important
Northumbrian king fell figl Jng against the Picts beyond
the Forth.

Mercia had her turn of supremacy in the eighth
century, under King Ofta, who drove back the Welsh and
took in a lot of their land beyond the Severn. Perhaps
it Avas he who built a great rampart there called Offa s
Dyke ; beyond it, even to this day, all is 6 Wales Then
his family in turn was beaten by Egbert, King of
Wessex (802-39). Thenceforth, Wessex was, in name
at least, supreme over all England. If ever there was
a capital city of England before Norman times it was
Winchester, the chief town of Wessex ; though London,
one of the few Roman cities that have never been

The Danes

37

destroyed or left desolate, must always have been a more
important place of trade. From Egbert King George V
is directly descended !

Egbert and his son and grandsons had to meet a new New
and terrible foe. Down the north-east wind, from Pirates

, m 7 from

Denmark, Norway and the Baltic, all through the ninth, Denmark
tenth and eleventh centuries, a continual stream of fierce fQdnvay
and cunning pirates began to pour upon Western Europe. 800-noo.
We call them ' the Danes ', or North-men. The British
Isles lay right in their path, and at one time or another
they harried them from end to end. The churches, in
which the principal wealth of the country was stored,
were sacked ; the monks were killed, and then the pirates
went back to their ships. From Britain they went on
to France and even into the Mediterranean : some of
them, indeed, crossed the Northern ocean to Iceland, to
Greenland, to North America. Their ships, some 80
feet long, and 1G feet broad, with a draft of 4 feet,
might carry crews of fifty men apiece, armed to the teeth
in shirts of mail, and bearing heavy axes with shafts as
long as a man. Often they came under pretence of
trading in slaves, and would trade honestly enough if
they thought the country too strong to be attacked.
About the middle of the ninth century they began to These
settle, and make homes in the very lands they had been begii^to
plundering. Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, the East gttle in
Riding of Yorkshire, were regularly colonized by them, about 860.
So were the Orkney and Shetland Isles, the Hebrides,
Caithness and Sutherland, as well as the Isle of Man and
the eastern coast of Ireland.

Their numbers were, however, small, and if Saxon
England under weak kings had not enjoyed too much
1 freedom ', they might have been beaten off ; but it

38

Saxon England

seemed impossible for the Saxons to collect an army in
less than a month, or to keep it in the field when
collected. Long before the English 'host' was ready
to fight, the pirates had harried the land and dis-
Alfredthe appeared. At last Alfred the Great (871-901), grand-
savelf son °f Egbert, began to turn the tide against the
England1 ^nvac^ers* ^e defended Wessex all along the line of the
871-901/ Upper Thames, in battle after desperate battle, and at
last beat a big Danish army somewhere in Wiltshire.
The pirate king Guthrum agreed to become a Christian,
and was allowed to settle with his men in North-Eastern
England. Soon after that we find English and 6 settled '
Danes fighting valiantly for their country against fresh
bands of Danish pirates. We may call Alfred the first
real 6 King of England ' ; he picked up the threads of
the national life which the Danes had cut to pieces.
He translated good books into the Saxon tongue ; he
started the great history of England, called the
' Chronicle ', which was kept year by year, in more than
The great one monastery, down to 1154. He and his son, Edward,
WeSex of and his grandsons, Athelstan and Edmund, built fleets
the tenth and fortresses, armed their people afresh and compelled
them to fight in their own defence. For some years
every fresh band of pirates met a warm reception, and
every rising of the Danes within the country was beaten
down. King Edgar, 959-75, was called £ the peaceful ',
and boasted that he had been rowed about on the river
Dee by six lesser kings.
It was a brief respite,

For all about the shadowy kings,
Denmark's grim ravens cowered their wings ;

and in the reign of Edgar's foolish son, Ethelred the

century.

Ethelred the Unready 39

Unready, the pirates came back more determined than King
before. S weyn, King of Denmark, came in person, and his ^Untd
son Canute ; and this time the Danes intended a thorough ready,
and wholesale conquest. This time Wessex fell also ; fresh. 16 '
even Canterbury was sacked, and its archbishop pelted ^*£*sh
to death with beef-bones after dinner. The ' wise men '
of unwise Ethelred were as useless as the House of
Commons would be to-day if there were a big invasion.
They talked, but did nothing. A country in such a
plight wants a man to lead it to war ; not thirty ' wise
men' or six hundred members of Parliament, with a
sprinkling of traitors among them, to discuss how to
make peace. Ethelred's ' wise men ' could only recom-
mend him to buy oft* the Danes with hard cash called
'Danegold' or 'Danegeld'. The Dunes pocketed the The
silver pennies, laughed, and came back for more. When ge^e
for a moment there arose a hero, Ethelred's son Edmund
Ironside, he fought in one year, as Alfred had fought,
six pitched battles and almost beat Canute. Then he King
agreed to divide the island with Canute, and was ^^"igag,
murdered in the next year (1017). Canute ruled Eng-
land until his death in 1035. He ruled Denmark and
Norway also, and was in fact a sort of Northern Emperor.

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation, what

To call upon a neighbour and to say : — ' Dane-

1 We invaded you last night — we are quite prepared to f^ezus
fight,

Unless you pay us cash to go away.'

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,

And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld

And then you'll get rid of the Dane !

40 Saxon England

It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say : —

* Though we know we should defeat you, we have not
the time to meet you,
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.'

And that is called paying the Dane-geld ;

But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld

You never get rid of the Dane.

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,

So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say : —

* We never pay any one Dane-geld,

No matter how trifling the cost,
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,

And the nation that plays it is lost ! '

And Canute ruled England righteously. He turned
Christian, he rebuilt the abbeys and churches wrhich his
ancestors had burned, he kept a strong little army of
English or Danish soldiers about his person, and he
kept order and peace. His sons, however, were good
King f°r nothing ; and in 1042 Edward, the younger son of
iieCon Ethelred, was recalled from * Normandy', whither he
fessor, had been sent to be out of Canute's way, and ruled
1042-1066. England as king till 1066.

Dangers Now, as we approach the end of the Saxon period of

abroad our h*s^01T> ^ us *a^e a 1°°^ a^ our foreign neighbours.

Those who will be important to us are four in number.
1. Denmark and Norway ; except in the reign of

Canute, these were always hostile.
Scotland. 2. Scotland, once Pict-land, the district north of the

Forth and Clyde. Celtic 1 Scots ' from Ireland had con-

Dangers from Abroad 41

quered Celtic Picts from the sixth to the ninth century.
They had brought with them the Christian faith, which
had been preached in Ireland by St. Patrick in the fifth
century. These Scots and Picts continually raided
Northumbria just as the Picts had raided Roman
Britain ; and Canute had bought off their raids by
giving to them all the land as far south as the Tweed,
which thus became the 6 border as we have it to-day,
between England and Scotland. Cumberland and
Lancashire seem to have remained an independent
Celtic country till the end of the eleventh century, just
as Wales did till the thirteenth.

3. Flanders, that is, roughly speaking, the modern Flanders.
Holland and Belgium ; a land already famous both for
pirates and traders ; it lies right opposite the mouth

of the Thames, and was just the place where the pirates
could sell the gold candlesticks which they stole out of
English churches.

4. Normandy, the great province on the north coast Nor-
of France, of which the river Seine is the centre. This m\n?7

5 ( and the

land the great Danish pirate, Hollo, had harried early Normans.

in the tenth century, until the wearied King of France

gave it him to keep, on condition that he would become

a Christian. The 'Normans', that is North-men, married

French wives, and became the cleverest, the fiercest,

and, according to the ideas of the day, the most pious

of Frenchmen. They did not cease to be adventurers,

and we find their young men seeking their fortunes

all over Europe. They thought their Saxon neighbours

very slow and stupid fellows, who were somehow in

possession of a very desirable island which they managed

very badly, and which it was the Normans' duty to take

if possible.

42

Saxon England

Duke Now King Edward was at heart more a Norman

than an Englishman, so pious that he was called ' the
Confessor', always weeping over imaginary sins, and
forgetting his real sin, which was the neglect of
the defence of his island. Like the Normans, he
despised his own people. He gave himself away to his
young cousin, Duke William of Normandy, and would
have liked to give the crown and land of England as
well — in fact he made some sort of promise to do so —
and he filled his court with Norman favourites and
bishops. England had never yet been a united country.
Ethelred, and Canute after him, had allowed great
i aldermen ' or earls to govern it, one for Northumbria,
one for Mercia, one for Wessex ; Edward continued the
same plan, and so these great earls were more powerful
than the King himself. Northumbria and Mercia were
largely Danish at heart and looked more to Denmark
than to Wessex for a king. It was on Wessex, then,
that the main resistance to Normandy would fall if the
Normans attacked England.

Earl Edward had no children, and as he drew towards his

WesseL°* death, the great Earl Harold of Wessex had to make up
his mind whether he would submit to Duke William of
Normandy, or call in Danish help, or seize the crown of
England for himself. Ambition and patriotism both

Becomes said 6 Seize it ' ; and on Edward's death, in January 1066,

{g>6? Harold did so.

Invasions Danes and Norwegians were on the alert too ; and it
fro^for- l°°ked as if England might be crushed between two sets
way and of enemies. For William had long been preparing for a
mandy. spring at it : he had won the friendship of Flanders ; and
he had the Pope on his side, for the English Church
was by no means too obedient to the Pope at this time.

Battle of Hastings

43

William now set about collecting a great army of the
best fighting men that France, Brittany and Flanders
could produce. Our brave Harold, on his side, got the
Wessex men under arms, and kept them watching all
the summer. Northern England could not help him,
for, a month before William landed from France,
a mighty Norwegian host appeared in the Humber.

Harold, then, had to prepare to meet two invasions ; Battle of
and most gallantly he met them. He flew to York, Stamford

0 J 7 Bridge,

smashed the Norwegians to pieces at Stamford Bridge, 1066, Sep-
and flew south again : but before he reached London teiuber-
William had landed in Sussex. There, upon October 14, Battle of
on or near the spot where Battle Abbey now stands, ^fings'
was fought the battle of Hastings, one of the most October,
decisive battles in history. It was the fight of French
cavalry and archers against the English and Danish
foot-soldiers and axe-men, a fight of valour and cunning
against valour without cunning. All day they fought,
till, in the autumn darkness, the last of Harold's axe-
men had fallen beside their dying King, and the few
English survivors had fled towards London. One of
them left a bag of coins in a ditch at Sedlescombe,
which was dug out a few years ago ; the poor little silver
pieces are a token of the many foreign countries with
which Old England had dealings.

The battle of Hastings decided, though not even Results of

tHe Nor

William knew it, that the great, slow, dogged, English m®n q^-
race, was to be governed and disciplined (and at first quest,
severely bullied in the process) by a small number of
the cleverest, strongest, most adventurous race then
alive. Nothing more was wanted to make our island
the greatest country in the world. The Saxons had
been sinking down into a sleepy, fat, drunken, unenter-

44 Saxon England

prising folk. The Normans were temperate in food and
drink, highly educated, as education went in those days,
restless, and fiery. They brought England back by the
scruff of the neck into the family of European nations,
back into close touch with the Roman Church, to which
a series of vigorous and clever popes was then giving
a new life. Such remains of Roman ideas of govern-
ment and order as were left in Europe were saved for
us by the Normans. The great Roman empire was like
a ship that had been wrecked on a beach ; its cargo
was plundered by nation after nation. But if any
nation had got the lions snare of its leavings it was the
Frenchmen, and through the Frenchmen the Normans,
and through the Normans the English.
The It cost William about six years of utterly ruthless

com?UeSt warfare to become master of all England. England
?06(M(H> res^ed him bit by bit ; its leaders had a dozen different
" plans ; he had but one plan, and he drove it through.
He was going to make an England that would resist the
next invader as one people. He had to do terrible
things : he had to harry all Yorkshire into a desert ;
he had to drive all the bravest English leaders into
forest and fen, or over the Scottish border, and to kill
them when he caught them. He spared no man who
stood in his way, but he spared all who asked his mercy.
He could not subdue Scotland ; but once he inarched
to the Tay and brought the Scottish king Malcolm to
his knees for the time.
The great William could not quite give up the plan of governing
knd-ian England by great earls ; he was obliged to reward the
owners. most powerful of his French followers with huge grants
of English land ; and these followers, who had been
quite accustomed to rebel against him in Normandy,

William the Conqueror 45

often rebelled against him and his descendants in
England. But his gifts of land were nearly always
scattered in such a way that one great man might have
land perhaps in ten different counties, but not too much
in any one place. Besides, every landowner, big or little,
had to swear a strong oath to be faithful to the King.
All gifts of land were to come only from the King,
all courts of justice should depend upon the King alone.
It remained for William's great-grandson Henry II to put
all this down in black and white, in ink, on parchment ;
Henry knew, what even William had not learned, that
the pen is a much more terrible and lasting recorder
than the sword.

In a word, William would be king not only of Wessex King
but of every rood of English hind and of all men iq^iJ^
dwelling thereon. And so the country began once more
to enjoy a peace it had never known since the Roman
legions left. The sons of the very men who had fought
William at Hastings flew to fight for William against
some rebel Norman earl, and earls and other men found
that if they wanted to play the game of rebellion they
had better go back to France. And the actual number
of Normans who remained in England and took root
was really very small, though among them we should
find nearly all the nobles, bishops, great abbots and
other leaders of the people. Very few Norman women
came, so these men married English wives, and, within
150 years, all difference between Normans and English-
men had vanished. The Norman Conquest of 10G6 was
the beginning of the history of the English race as one
people and of England as a great power in Europe.
You might say, indeed —

<

Saxon England

England's on the anvil — hear the hammers ring —
Clanging from the Severn to the Tyne !

Never was a blacksmith like our Norman King-
England 's being hammered, hammered, hammered
into line !

England 's on the anvil ! Heavy are the blows !

(But the work will be a marvel when it's done)
Little bits of Kingdoms cannot stand against their foes.

England 's being hammered, hammered, hammered
into one !

There shall be one people — it shall serve one Lord —

(Neither Priest nor Baron shall escape !)
It shall have one speech and law, soul and strength and
sword.

England 's being hammered, hammered, hammered
into shape !

William's
work.

CHAPTER III

THE NORMAN KINGS, 1066-1154

So at last there was going to be a real government in The
this country, and it was going to do its duty. Few the^khi^s
kings in the Middle Ages had any high idea of their in Noi-
fi duty towards their people 9 such as a great Roman England.
Emperor had, or such as King George V has. They
chiefly thought of their country as a property, or
' estate ', which they were going to cultivate mainly for
their own benefit. But the better a king's ' estate ' was
cultivated, the better off were the people on it ; and,
when I say the 'people ', I mean every one except a few,
perhaps a couple of hundred of the 6 barons ' or greatest
landowners. A king could only grow very rich and
powerful when his country was at peace at home and
well armed against foreign foes ; his people could only
grow rich under the same conditions.

Not so the great barons. Each of them could most Their
easily increase his riches at the expense of some other tvitlf the**
great baron or of the king ; and the people who lived ^£"^-3
near him would be the first to suffer if he were allowed
to do so. William had been obliged to allow his barons
and earls to judge and govern their tenants in accor-
dance with those ' feudal ' customs which had come to be
universal in Western Europe since Roman law had been
lost and strong government with it. The great kings
who succeeded him slowly, painfully, out of scanty
material, had to recreate a strong government, and, so,
to give peace and order.

William I

The
people
will help
the King
against
the

barons.
The

Sheriffs.

Castles.

Now of the first four, whom alone we call 6 Norman '
kings, three were w ise and strong, — William I, William II,
and Henry I, — and the fourth, Stephen, was foolish and
weak. So, while the first sixty-nine years after the con-
quest were a time of increasing peace and prosperity,
the next nineteen were the most dreadful period in our
history.

Remember that the Norman barons were only five or
six generations removed from the fierce Danish pirates
who followed Rollo to France. There, as there were no
strong kings to restrain them, they had been accustomed
to build castles and to make their tenants fight for them
in their private quarrels. When they got to England,
and grew richer in lands and tenants than they had been
in Normandy, they expected to play their familiar game
with even greater success. Their kings, however, from
the first, determined they should not do so.

William found, in the slow, undisciplined old Saxon
life, several things which served him to keep his barons
in order. For instance, there was an officer in every
county called a sheriff; he collected the King's rents
and taxes ; he presided over the rude court of justice
which was held in every county ; he was supposed to
lead to battle the free landowners of that county.
William made his sheriffs much more powerful, and
made them responsible for the peace of their counties.
In England, too, there had been few castles, and these
only stockades of wood on the top of earthen mounds ;
whereas in France every baron had a castle. On the
Welsh and Scottish borders William was obliged to
allow, and even to encourage his followers to build
castles, but elsewhere he forbade it. But he built a great
many royal castles and filled them with faithful paid

Domesday Book 49

soldiers. Again, in Normandy there had been barons
as rich in lands and money as the Duke himself ; but
William kept enormous tracts of English land in his
own hands, and so made the Crown ten times richer
than any baron. In Normandy the Duke had no real Taxes,
system of taxes ; in England the King could and did
levy a regular tax of so many shillings on each estate.
Ethelred had begun this in order to get money to bribe
the Danes ; the later kings had continued it.

Many estates were, however, free from this tax, and Domes-
no doubt it was always difficult to collect. So, in 1085, jq^00^
William sent officers to every village and county in Eng-
land to find out who must pay the tax and how much
each must pay. These officers called together a sort of
6 Jury 9 of the villagers, who declared the value of the
estate. The results were collected and written down in
6 Domesday Book which you may see in the Record
Office. An extract from it will run somewhat like
this: — ' County of Cambridge: In Blackacre are ten
hides [the hide is an old measure of land, say 120 acres].
Thurstan holds it. In King Edward's time Wulfstan
held it. It was worth £2 6s. 8d. Xow it is worth
£4 13s. 4rfL It never paid tax. There is land for eight
ploughs. There are two freeholders and ten serfs.
The priest holds half a hide. There is a mill, value
10s. There is wood for 100 pigs, and pasture for 20
cows.'

Are you astonished at the small value of land ? You Old
must remember that you could then buy with £l what ^"ney1
might now cost you £40. For there was little silver and
less gold in Europe before the discovery of America.
Few gold coins were made in England before the reign
of Edward III.

1184 D

50

William I

The
popula-
tion of
England
in 1085.

Customs
and laws.

Free
land-
owners
and un-
free

tenants.

Life in the
country.

From Domesday Book we can make a rough guess at
the population of England in the eleventh century, say
about 2,000,000, whereas now it is over 40,000,000.
The book does not mention the number of people in the
towns, but in many towns it does mention the number of
houses. Probably no town, except London, had then as
many as ten thousand people. Of many places the book
says that they were ' waste that is, had been burned,
either by accidental fires (which must constantly have
been occurring w hen all buildings were of wood) or by
Danes or Normans in the process of conquest. It also
tells something of the > customs ' which prevailed in dif-
ferent counties and towns. We are getting near an age
when we shall be able to call such customs 6 Laws \ The
Norman kings tried to use old English customs and to
improve them. But theft and murder were still reckoned
more as offences against the family of the person wronged
than as crimes against the State. You could still atone
for such offences by a fine. It was not till late in the
twelfth century that you would infallibly be hanged if
you were caught ; and the certainty of punishment is
what really prevents crime.

Now, you can see that the result of an inquiry like
Domesday was that the kings knew a great deal about
their country and about their people. They would
know, for instance, what great baron or earl was really
dangerous ; on what part of England what taxes could
be levied, and so on. No doubt the new Norman land-
owners were often hard to their Saxon tenants. But it
would not pay them to be too hard. They wanted rents
and labour, and a starving man cannot pay rent or work
in the fields. The land was the only source of riches,
and therefore every gentleman had to be first and fore-

Life in the Country 51

most a farmer, and his tenants under him had to be
farmers or farm labourers too. Domesday mentions,
under strange names, a great number of different classes
of farming tenants ; but, within the next century, we
find that all these are melted away into two, the free
and the un-free, the freeholders and the * villeins' or
' serfs The former are men whose land averages perhaps
forty acres. They pay some small rent in money or in
produce to the squire or ' lord of the manor they follow
the sheriff to battle when he bids them. The villein
perhaps farms nearly as much land as the freeholder.
But he is not free ; he is bound to pay a rent in labour,
say two or even three days a week on the squire's land,
many extra days at harvest time, and perhaps to pay so
many eggs or pigs or hens every year ; nor may he sell
his land or go away without his squire's leave. In fact
he is very much at the mercy of the squire until the
latter half of the twelfth century, when the King's Law
begins to protect him against the squire, to hang him if
he commits crimes, and to enroll him its a soldier. But
it will not pay the squire to oppress him too much if he
is to get good work out of him. These clever Normans,
all but a few of the greatest barons, soon made common
cause with their tenants, soon became English at heart.
Over them, too, the good land threw its dear familiar
spell, and made them love it beyond all things.

Norman and Saxon.

1 My son/ said the Norman Baron, ' 1 am dying, and you Jno * ?/»

will be heir baron
To all the broad acres in England that William crave me about his
for my share

n 2

52

William I

When we conquered the Saxon at Hastings, and a nice
little handful it is.

But before you go over to rule it I want you to under-
stand this : —

6 The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are
not so polite,

But he never means anything serious till he talks about

justice and right ;
When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen

set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, " This isn't fair dealing," my son,

leave the Saxon alone.

'You can horsewhip your Gascony archers, or torture

your Picardy spears,
But don't try that game on the Saxon ; you'll have the

whole brood round your ears.
From the richest old Thane in the county to the poorest

chained serf in the fields,
They'll be at you and on you like hornets, and, if you are

wise, you will yield !

' But first you must master their language, their dialect,

proverbs and songs,
Don't trust any clerk to interpret when they come with

the tale of their wrongs.
Let them know that you know what they're saying ; let

them feel that you know what to say ;
Yes, even when you want to go hunting, hear them out

if it takes you all day.

' They'll drink every hour of the daylight and poach every

hour of the dark,
It ?s the sport not the rabbits they're after (we've plenty

of game in the park).
Don't hang them or cut off their fingers. That 's wasteful

as well as unkind,
For a hard-bitten, South-country poacher makes the

best man-at-arms you can find.

Life in the Towns

'Appear with your wife and the children at their weddings

and funerals and feasts ;
Be polite but not friendly to Bishops ; be good to all

poor parish priests ;
Say " we", " us " and " ours " when you're talking instead

of " you fellows " and " I ".
Don't ride over seeds ; keep your temper ; and never

you tell 'em a lie ! '

The towns were no doubt horrid places. The fortifi- Life in the
cation of one or more ' boroughs ' in each county had towns-
been begun by the son and grandsons of King Alfred in
their wars against the Danes. Besides a wooden castle on
a mound of earth, there would probably be some sort of
wooden paling round the towns ; and in the twelfth cen-
tury palings would be replaced by stone walls. London,
York, Chester probably kept their old Roman walls of
stone and occasionally repaired them. As for cleanliness
and what we now call c sanitation ', there was none. All
refuse was thrown into the streets, which only rain-storms
washed, and where pigs, dogs and kites scavenged
freely. Each trade or craft had its own street, and a
walk down ' Butchers' Row ' would probably be unpleas-
ing to modern noses, lint there was strong patriotism
in the towns, and great rivalry between them. A towns-
man from Abingdon was a suspected ' foreigner ' to the
citizens of Oxford. In Sussex to-day the old folk in
some villages speak of a hop-picker from another village
as a 1 foreigner '.

Both in town and country the food, even of the poor- The food
est, was fairly plentiful. Salt meat, mainly pork, and in ^e^fe
Lent salt fish, was the rule, and was washed down by
huge floods of strong beer. There were no workhouses
and no provision for the poor except charity, but charity

54

William I

(called 6 almsgiving ') was universal, and beggars swarmed
everywhere. If no one else would feed them, the monks
always would, and I fear they made little difference*
between those who were really in need and those who
preferred begging to working. Washing was almost
unknown. Even in the King's household, while there
were hundreds of servants in the cooking departments,
there were only four persons in the laundry. Horrible
diseases like leprosy were common, and occasionally
pestilence swept away whole villages and streets of
people.

Life then was undoubtedly shorter, and its conditions
harder, than to-day ; but I think it was often merrier.
Holidays were much more frequent ; for the all-powerful
Church forbade work on the very numerous saints' days.
Religion influenced every act of life from the cradle to
the grave. All the village feasts and fairs centred
round the village church and were blessed by some
saint. The Norman bishops at once woke up the sleepy
Saxon priests and abbots, taught them to use better
music, more splendid and more frequent services, cleaner
ways of life. Stone churches replaced the wooden ones,
and those mighty Norman cathedrals, so much of which
remains to-day, began to grow up. The zeal for monkery
continued right into the thirteenth century, although a
pious Norman gentleman seldom went into a monastery
himself till his fighting days were over. In the Church a
career was open to the poorest village lad who was clever
and industrious ; he might rise to be abbot, bishop,
councillor of kings, or even Pope. All schools were in
the hands of churchmen, and Latin was the universal
language of the Church throughout Western Europe.

In King Williams ' Great Council ', which took the place

The King's Great Council

55

of the Saxon 6 Wise men and which became the direct The
father of our House of Lords, there would sit perhaps q^£8
150 great lay barons, nineteen bishops, and some thirty Council,
abbots ; but the churchmen would be the most learned,
the most cunning and the most regular attendants.
Though this Great Council met only for a few days in
each year, the King would need secretaries and lawyers
and officials of one kind or another to be continually
about his person ; and most of these would be church-
men, whom he would reward with bishoprics and abbeys
and livings. So far as there was what we now call
a ' Ministry ' or a ' Privy Council it consisted mainly
of churchmen.

So powerful indeed was the Church that quarrels Quarrels
between it and the strong kings were of frequent occur- KiM%ith
rence during the next century or two. The churchmen the
were too apt to look to the Pope as their real head
instead of the King. The popes always tried to keep
the Church independent of the King. They wanted the
clergy to pay no taxes for their lands, to have separate
courts of justice, to be governed by other laws than
those of the laymen, and yet to be wholly defended by
the kings and laymen. Now no good king approved
of these demands, which were indeed monstrous if you
consider that the clergy owned between one-quarter
and one-third of the land of England, and were getting
more and more, from gifts by pious laymen, every day.
AVilliam I had to allow the Church to have separate
courts of justice, but he had no actual quarrel with the
Pope, mainly because his archbishop, Lanfranc, was
a very wise man. William II and Henry I each had
sharp quarrels with Archbishop Anselm, while as for
poor Stephen, he was at the mercy of the great bishops.

56

William I

I don't think you want to know at what date this or
that baron rebelled against William or Henry, or at
what date William or Henry sent an army against the
King of France or the Welsh ; I would rather that you
would understand how these kings were pursuing, on
the whole, two main tasks. First they were trying
to make England and Wales one compact kingdom, and
secondly they were obliged, because they were Dukes
of Normandy, to quarrel with the Kings of France. It
was they, then, who founded our 800-year-long hostility
to the gallant Frenchmen, which is now, happily, at
an end.

The first of these tasks was mainly left to the great
Norman barons, the Earls of Chester, Shrewsbury and
Gloucester, who built castles on the Welsh border and
sent continual expeditions far into Wales. William II
once marched himself to the foot of Snowdon, and gave
the Welsh thieves a very severe lesson against stealing
English cattle and murdering English settlers. Henry I
started a regular colony of Englishmen in Pembroke-
shire. Welsh ' princes ' continued to exist till the end
of the thirteenth century, but only once troubled
England seriously after Henry Is time.

In the north-west, William II completely conquered
Westmoreland, Lancashire and Cumberland, made them
English ground for ever, and rebuilt the old Roman
fortress of Carlisle. On the Scottish border William I
built a great fortress at Newcastle-on-Tyne ; but this
did not stop King Malcolm's raids, for many Saxons,
who had lost their lands in 1066, had fled to Scotland,
and helped in these raids. But William II and Henry I
managed their Scottish neighbours so cleverly, that
from 1095 to 1138 there were no more Scottish raids at

Quarrels with the King of France 57

all. During these years of peace many Norman barons
got into the south of Scotland, were welcomed and
were endowed with lands by King David I.

As regards the French business, there was very little Quarrels
real peace between the Duke of Normandy and the King ofe
French King. And as the former was now King of ^)1^nc1e1v.
England also, he generally got the best of it. Until
the middle of the twelfth century, the King of France
was very poor and could get very few people to fight for
him, whereas Henry I once shipped a lot of sturdy
English soldiers across the Channel, and won a grea^t
victory at Tenchebray, HOG, over Norman rebels who
were being encouraged by the French King. As a rule,
however, our kings fought their battles in France with
foreign soldiers hired in Flanders. The English kings
even had some sort of a fleet, for the ' Cinque Ports '
(Dover, Sandwich, Hythe, Romney and Hastings) were
obliged to furnish them a certain number of ships every
year. The causes of these quarrels with France are
not interesting to us. They were usually about some
frontier castle which the French King had grabbed or
wanted to grab from the Duke, or the Duke from the
King. At one of these quarrels William the Conqueror
met his death in 1087. A terrible king and a terrible
man he had been ; but he had kept peace, and the fiercest
baron had trembled before him. His one pleasure was
hunting, and he was so greedy of it, that he began
to make a series of cruel laws against poachers which
later kings kept up till 1217. It was death to kill a
stag in the royal forests.

His eldest son, Robert, was a weak, good-natured
fellow, who had once rebelled against his father, and was
the darling of the turbulent barons. So William had

58

William II

The
sons of
William I.

William
II, called
4 Rufus \
1087-1100.

The first
Crusade,
1096.

left Normandy to Robert and England to his second son,
William, who was called 6 Rufus' from his red hair.
Rufus was a violent ruffian, grasping and cruel, and
mocked at everything holy ; but he was strong and
clever too, a mighty warrior and leader of men. He had
at once to meet a fearful rebellion got up by Robert,
but the English freeholders turned out in crowds to help
him, and he smashed the rebels and battered down their
castles as he battered down everything that came in his
path. Soon he managed to grab Normandy also from
poor Robert, who was always deep in debt and trouble
of every sort.

In 1096 Robert had gone to the East, and many of the
turbulent French and Norman barons with him. They
had gone in order to fulfil one of the noblest yet vainest
dreams of those times, to rescue the Holy Land from the
infidel Saracens or 6 Turks ', who had recently taken Jeru-
salem. The Saracens bullied pilgrims who went thither
to venerate the places of Christ's earthly ministry and
passion. These expeditions from the West were called
' Crusades and pious adventurers went with them from
all parts of Europe. A man who died upon a crusade
thought that he was fairly sure of going straight to
Heaven. This first Crusade was successful, and a
Christian kingdom was set up in Jerusalem which lasted
there for eighty-eight years, and in some parts of Pales-
tine for nearly two hundred years. Europe learned
much from the Crusades, and many luxuries, arts and
crafts were brought back to it from the East. But the
name got much abused, and at last the popes called
every private quarrel of their own a crusade, promising
their blessing to all who paid money to it, and scolding
all who refused.

Henry I

59

A prudent yet wicked English king like Rufus stayed
at home in spite of the Pope's scoldings, and grabbed as
much as he could of the property of his neighbours who
went upon the crusade.

When Robert came back he found that he had lost Henry I,

1100— 1 1 3 r

another chance. Rufus had been shot in the year 1100,
while hunting in the Xcw Forest, and his youngest
brother Henry had seized the crown of England. Of
course Robert rebelled, and the great barons, both of
England and Normandy, with him. But, equally of
course, Henry and his faithful Englishmen made short
work of every rebellion. English chroniclers called
Henry I the 'Lion of Justice', and it was not a bad
name for him. Though cruel and selfish, he was a much
more respectable character than Rufus, and he kept
order splendidly. He was a man of learning, which till
then had been unusual in royal families. 'An unlearned
king,' he used to say, ' is a crowned ass.' Only one of his
successors, before the eighteenth century, was wholly
unlearned, and that was Edward II, who came to a bad
end. Henry endeared himself to his Englishmen by
marrying the last princess of the old Saxon race, Edith,
daughter of Queen Margaret of Scotland, who was the
great-great-granddaughter of Ethelred the Unready.
Among Henry's courtiers and servants we often find the
names of Englishmen as well as Xormans, though all the
highest places in the Church were still held by Xormans
or by men of mixed race. Well able to fight, and quite
ready to do so when it was necessary, Henry, like other
clever kings, avoided all unnecessary wars, and got on
well with the Scottish and sometimes even with the
French kings.

But his only son was drowned in the wreck of the

60 Stephen

Stephen
and

Matilda,
1135-54.

Civil War,
1138-52.

The

barons are
let loose.

1 White Ship ' in crossing the Channel ; and when
Henry died, in 1135, his heir was his only daughter,
Matilda, whose second husband was Geoffrey Plantagenet,
Count of Anjou in France. Now no woman had ever
reigned in England, and so, when Count Stephen of
Blois, son of William Is daughter Adela, appeared in
London and claimed the crown, he was welcomed as
king, although he and most of the barons had already
promised to uphold the claim of Matilda. Stephen was
known to be a kind-hearted fellow who would not rule
too strictly ; he was, in fact, just like his uncle Robert.

Alas for England ! Matilda, naturally enough, claimed
her ' rights', and civil war began almost at once.
Nothing could have suited the barons better. They
changed sides continually, and fought now for Stephen
and now for Matilda, as long as there was any one left
to fight. 'For nineteen winters/ says the old English
chronicler, who was still writing in his monastery at
Peterborough, c this went on.' Castles sprang up every-
where, ' full of devils/ who tortured men for their riches,
made war for sport, burnt towns and corn-crops, coined
their own money and compelled the poor to take it in
payment. At the end of the reign it was said there
were over three hundred unlicensed castles in England.
Poor Stephen did his best ; he flew hither and thither
besieging these castles, but seldom had patience to take
one. He and Matilda (who was just as bad, and a horrid
female into the bargain) could only think of bribing the
great barons to fight for them by heaping lands, riches
and offices on them ; and, between the pair of them, the
treasures of the crown of England were soon spent. The
King of Scots, David I, who was Matilda's cousin, rushed
in at the very beginning with a great army of wild men,

' Battle of the Standard ' 61

and, though the Yorkshiremen gave him a sound thrash-
ing at the 6 Battle of the Standard' near Northallerton, 'Battle
1138, he stuck to Cumberland, and Stephen soon tried gt™f
to bribe him by giving him Northumberland also. So, dard.'
as the old chronicler says, ' it seemed to Englishmen as
if God slept and all His saints.' The Church alone re-
mained a refuge for the oppressed, and, naturally enough,
the Church came out at the end of it all, not onlv much
richer, but with much more power over the hearts of
men.

At last in 1152 young Henry, the son of Matilda and Peace
Geoffrey, made peace at Wallingford with Stephen, who Waifii^.
was now an old and worn-out man. Henry was to forcl»
govern England as chief minister, while Stephen lived,
and then to succeed to the crown. And in two years
Stephen died and Henry II became King of England.

CHAPTER IV

HENRY II TO HENRY III, 1154-1272;
THE BEGINNINGS OF PARLIAMENT

The task The young man of twenty-one, whom we call Henry II,
KingGin came *° a country absolutely wasted with civil war.
1154. When he died, thirty-five years later, he left it the
richest, the most peaceful, the most intelligent, the
most united kingdom in Europe. There is no misery
like that of civil war ; there have been two civil wars
since that date, one in the fifteenth and one in the
seventeenth century ; and of course during these wars
the country people suffered. But so firmly did the
sense of law and order, which Henry II drove into his
people's heads, take root, that there was no complete
upset of civil life, even in these later civil wars. We
cannot of course attribute all the later good fortune of
the country to one man, not even to such a great and
wise man as Henry II. His path had been prepared for
him long before, and he was extraordinarily fortunate
His fa- in his opportunity. A great revival of intelligence had
opportu^ already begun all over Europe, and a great revival of
nity. trade, no doubt largely owing to the lessons learned in
the Crusades. Long-neglected books of Roman Law had
been found, and French and Italian lawyers were reading
them. Schools were increasing, and even 6 Universities',
of which Oxford w as the first in England, were beginning.
The towns had been gaining in riches in spite of the civil
war ; London, to which Henry I had given a ' Charter
allowing it to govern itself and keep its own customs,
was even more ahead of the other English towns than

Character of Henry II 63

it is to-day. The difference of race between Norman
and Englishman was being forgotten. We were growing
into one 6 people The worst followers of the worst
barons had killed each other off during the war, or gone
away to the Crusades. Henry had little difficulty in
getting rid of those that remained, and knocking down
their ramshackle castles.

But great as the opportunity was, it would have been Character
of no use if Henry had not been a very great man — one i{ Henry
of the greatest kings who ever lived. His power of
work, and of making other people work, was amazing ; he
seemed to have a hundred pairs of eyes. Laziness was
to him the one unpardonable crime. For pomp, even for
dignity, he cared nothing. He was cursed, as all kings
of his race were, with the most frightful temper ; but
he was merciful and forgiving when his rage was over.
Norman on the mothers side, English on the grand-
mother's, he was the most French of Frenchmen by
his father's family, the House of Anjou. He had just
married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the greatest heiress in
Europe, who owned all South-Western France, from the
River Loire to the Pyrenees.

Aquitaine, or i Gascony ', or 1 Guienne', as the southern His
part of it is called, was a land of small and very turbu- forel£n

L 7 J posses-

lent nobles, who could never get enough fighting. Even sions

Henry never succeeded in keeping them in order. But i)urc\en to
of course, with all this land, and with the riches of him.
England at his back, Henry ought to have been a much
more powerful man than his 'overlord', the King of
France. Yet the truth is, that all these different French
provinces, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Aqui-
taine, were rather a trouble than an advantage to him.
They cost more to keep in order than they brought in

Henry II

Hostility
of Eng.
land and
France.

Henry II
as Law-
giver.

in rents and taxes, and they led to continual quarrels,
mostly about frontier castles, with the French King
Louis VII and his successor, Philip II. Henry and his
son, Richard I, in fact did well in keeping their huge
loosely-knit bundle of provinces together as long as
they did. John, who succeeded Richard, lost all the
best parts of them at once.

For the kings of France were doing just what our
kings were doing ; they were trying to make all French-
men feel that they were one people. So Henry, Richard
and John were really fighting a losing battle in France.
For the details of that battle I do not care two straws.
Moreover, our sympathies ought to be on the side of the
French kings, unless they invaded England.

What really matters to us is what Henry was doing in
England. You may be sure that he gave no one any
rest there, neither his many friends, nor his few foes.
The greatest thing England owes to him is the system of
Law, which really began in his reign, and has gone on
being improved by skilful lawyers ever since. Till his
reign, all the Kings servants, sheriffs, officers, bishops
and the rest, had acted as judges, rent-collectors, soldiers,
taxing-men without distinction ; and the Kings Courts
of Justice had been held wherever the King happened
to be. But Henry picked out specially trained men for
judges, and confined them to the one business of judging.
He chose men who knew some Roman Law, and who
would be able to improve our stupid old-fashioned
customs by its light. He swept away a great many of
such customs, among other things the fines for murder,
which he treated by hanging ; he built prisons in every
county, and kept offenders in them until the judges
came round 'on circuit', as, you know, they still do

Henry II as Lawgiver

four times a year. The judges gave these offenders
a fair trial, in which some sort of 'jury' of their neigh-
bours had a hand ; and if they were found guilty they
were hanged — which surprised them a good deal. The
King could not wholly put down the barons' private
courts of justice, but he took away every shred of real
power from them ; his sheriffs, he said, were to go every-
where, no matter what privileges a baron might claim.
Another splendid thing which Henry did was to estab-
lish one coinage for the whole country, stamped at his
royal mint ; and woe it was to the man who ' uttered '
false coins !

As regards his army of freeholders, he compelled He trains

, i • ■ • i i ii the nation

every man to keep arms m his house to be used when lo war>
the sheriff called him to battle. A rich landowner had
to be armed in complete chain-mail, to provide his
own horses and to serve in the cavalry, and was c alled
a ' knight'. But even a man who possessed the small
sum of £6 135. 4<d. had to provide himself with a steel
cap, a neck-piece of mail and a spear ; while every free
man, in town or country, had to have a leather jacket,
a steel cap and a spear. And this 1 territorial army '
was not only to fight, but to keep the peace also, to
chase rogues and thieves, to watch at night at the
town gates ; in fact, as we should now say, to ' assist
the police '.

As regards taxes, Henry did not demand huge sums His taxes,
from all his subjects without distinction of wealth, but
he sent officials round the country, who called together
the principal inhabitants of each village and town, and
got them to say what their neighbours as w ell as them-
selves could afford to pay. So you see, by all these
measures, King Henry interested his subjects in tin

1134 E

66

Henry II

His

quarrel

with

Thomas

Becket,

1164-70.

government. He made them see that they had duties
as well as rights, a fact which the poorer classes of
Englishmen have almost wholly forgotten to-day.

But for one frightful stroke of ill-luck Henry might
have left an England completely united. Hear the
story of St. Thomas Becket.

The twelfth century was the 6 golden age' of the
Church. The aims of the popes, even of those popes
wrho were most hostile to the growth of nations,
were not entirely selfish. Christendom was to them
one family which God had given them to rule. Kings
were to be the earthly instruments of their will, to be
petted as long as they obeyed, but scolded and even
deposed when they did not. No king and no lay court
of justice was to dare to touch a priest, much less to
hang him if he committed murder or theft, which too
many priests still did. Henry wanted to hang such
priests. He was told of a hundred murders committed
by priests in the first ten years of his reign, which had
gone unpunished, because the Church said all priests
were ' sacred'. So he chose his favourite minister,
Thomas Becket, already Chancellor of England, to be
Archbishop of Canterbury. He believed that Thomas
would help him to make one law for clergymen and
laymen alike ; but Thomas, as proud and hot-tempered
a man as the King, had no sooner become xirchbishop
than he turned right round and supported the most
extreme claims of the Church. He even went further
than the Pope, who was most anxious not to quarrel
with Henry. ' The Church lands/ he said, ' should pay
no taxes ; as for hanging priests, he would not hear
of it/ Henry was naturally furious, especially when
Thomas went abroad and stirred up the King of France

Murder of Becket G7

and the Pope against him. After a long and weary

quarrel Henry, in a fit of passion, used some rash words

which some wicked courtiers interpreted to mean that

they were to kill Thomas. They slipped away secretly Murder of

from the King's court and murdered the Archbishop in f^o^'

his own cathedral.

^THE, HURJ3ER OF BECKET-"

Such a deed of horror was unknown since the days 4 Saint
of the heathen Danes. Thomas at once became both Tnomas

the

martyr and saint, even in the eyes of those who had Martyr.1
hated his pride while he lived. Men believed that
miracles were worked at his tomb, that a touch of his
bones would restore the dead to life. A pilgrimage to

v 2

68

Henry II

The last
baronial
rebellion.
1174-5.

Henry
137s later
years,
1175-89.

His visit
to Ireland,
1171-2.
State of
Ireland.

his shrine at Canterbury became before long the duty
of every pious Englishman.

But the worst result was that all the Kings attempts
to bring the Churchmen under the law utterly failed ;
and the claims of the Church to be independent of
the State actually increased for a century to come.
All Henry's enemies also took the opportunity to jump
on him at once. A fearful outbreak of the barons
(who had been quiet for twenty years), both in England
and Normandy, came to a head in 1174, and was sup-
ported by both the French and Scottish kings, by Henry's
own eldest son (a vain young fool), and by Queen
Eleanor herself. Henry's throne rocked and tottered ;
but, of course, all good Englishmen stood stiffly for
their King, and, when he had knelt in penitence at
Becket's tomb, and allowed the Canterbury monks to
give him a sound flogging there, he triumphed over
his enemies. He took the King of Scots prisoner, and
compelled the rest of the barons to sue for mercy.
This mercy he freely gave them. No one was hanged
for the rebellion, and most people concerned got off
with a fine.

His last years were again disturbed by revolts, but
not in England. Philip II was the first of the really
great French kings, bent on uniting all Frenchmen ;
and he easily enticed, not only Henry's barons, but his
three younger sons, Richard, Geoffrey and John, into
rebellion. Henry died of a broken heart at their
ingratitude in 1189.

One event of his reign must not be forgotten, his
visit to Ireland in 1171-2. St. Patrick, you may have
heard, had banished the snakes from that island, but
had not succeeded in banishing the murderers and

State of Ireland

69

thieves, who were worse than many snakes. In spite
of some few settlements of Danish pirates and traders
on the eastern coast, Ireland had remained purely
Celtic and purely a pasture country. All wealth was
reckoned in cows ; Rome had never set foot there, so
there was a king for every day in the week, and the
sole amusement of such persons was to drive off each
other's cows, and to kill all who resisted. In Henry IFs
time this had been going on for at least 700 years, and
during the 700 that have followed much the same thing
would have been going on, if the English Government
had not occasionally interfered.

Well, in 1168, one of these wild kings, being in more
than usual trouble, came to Henry and asked for help.
Henry said, 'Oh, go and try some of my barons on the
Welsh border ; they are fine fighting-men. I have no
objection to their going to help you/ The Welsh border
barons promptly went, and, of course, being well armed
and trained, a few hundred of their soldiers simply drove
everything before them in Ireland, and won, as their
reward, enormous estates there. The King began to be
anxious about the business, and so, in 1171, he sailed
over to Waterford and spent half a year in Ireland.
The Irish kings hastened, one after another, to make
complete submission to him ; he confirmed his English
subjects in their new possessions ; he divided the island
into counties, appointed sheriffs and judges for it — and
then he went home. He had made only a half-conquest,
which is always a bad business, and the English he
left behind him soon became as wild and barbarous
as the Irishmen themselves.

Henry was succeeded in all his vast dominions by his Richard T,
eldest surviving son, Richard I, ' Richard the Lion 11S9_99-

Richard I

Richard
on the
Crusade ;
his

quarrels

with

France.

Heart/ ' Richard Yea and Nay/ so called because he
spoke the truth. He found England at profound peace ;
his father's great lawyers and ministers continued to
govern it for him until his death ten years later. He
himself cared little for it, except for the money he
could squeeze out of it to serve the two objects which
really interested him. These were to deliver Jerusalem,
which had again been taken by the Saracens, and to
save his foreign provinces from being swallowed by the
French King.

Richard was a most gallant soldier and a born leader
of men in war ; he was generous and forgiving ; but of
his father's really great qualities he had very few. He
had been spoilt as a child, and he remained a great,
jolly, impatient child till his death. He and his rival,
King Philip, at once set out on the Crusade in 1190,
and quarrelled continually. Philip soon slipped off
home, and began to grab Richards French provinces,
with the aid of the treacherous John, Richard's youngest
brother, who had stayed in England. John was the one
unmitigated scoundrel in the whole family ; and he
rejoiced greatly when he heard that his brother, who
had failed to deliver Jerusalem, had been taken captive
on his way home from Palestine, and handed over to the
unscrupulous German Emperor, Henry VI. This royal
brigand demanded an enormous ransom for Richard,
and of course heavy taxes had to be raised in England
to pay him. But it did not interrupt the good peace,
and Richard, who forgave his wicked brother directly
he was free, spent the rest of his short reign in France,
fighting King Philip, not altogether without success.
He was killed at the siege of a small French castle in
1199.

Murder of Prince Arthur

71

The proper heir to the throne was Arthur of Brit- jonn?
tany, a mere boy, son of Henry IFs third son Geoffrey, H99-1216
who had died in 1186. But John was in England, and
seized the crown without much difficulty. Of course
he quarrelled at once with his old friend Philip, and
Philip knew that his own time and that of France had
now come. John did, indeed, get hold of little Arthur Murder of
and had him murdered ; but then dawdled away his \Tr^
time in small sieges and useless raids in France, while about
Philip overran all John's French dominions except 1203'
Aquitaine with perfect ease.

By 1205, Normandy, Maine, Touraine, Anjou, the Loss of
inheritance of the mighty Norman and Angevin races, ^n'dy
had gone to France for good. And of the French 1295.
possessions of England, only the far south-west re-
mained.

The English barons, most of whom had owned lands Anger of
in Normandy ever since 10GG, were of course furious lhe

. . barons.

with their King, especially when he kept on screwing
enormous sums of money from them, calling out large
armies to fight and then running away without fighting.
As for Aquitaine, none of them owned lands there, and
they refused to defend it. John raved and cursed, and
practised horrible cruelties on any enemies he could
catch, and generally behaved in a most unkingly fashion.
But in 1206 he began quite a new quarrel with the John's
English Church and the Pope. His cause was at first ^rpo e
a good one, for it was about the appointment of the Innocent
Archbishop of Canterbury. Both the Pope and the \^
monks at Canterbury had refused to accept the man
whom John named as Archbishop; and the Pope had
even appointed one Stephen Langton in his place. John
swore a horrid oath that he would never receive

72 ^ John

Langton as Archbishop ; and for five years he held his
own. The Pope tried every weapon at his command ;
he ' excommunicated 7 John, that is to say, he cut him
off from all Christian rites ; he put England under an
' interdict which meant that no one could be buried
with the full burial service, no one married in church,
no church bells rung, and in fact all the best religious
services and sacraments were suspended. Finally, the
Pope declared John deposed, and told Philip to go and
depose him.

Now, much as Englishmen hated their tyrannical
King, they hated still more the idea of an Italian priest
dealing thus with the crown and liberty of England ;
and most honest men were prepared to support even
John against Philip and the Pope.
John John, for his part, confiscated all Church property in

submits to .

the Pope, England and bestowed it on a set of foreign favourites
1213. ail(j parasites, mostly mercenary soldiers from Flanders.

Then suddenly he gave away his own cause. In 1213
he became frightened, made the most abject submission
to the Pope, and promised to hold his crown and country
for the future as the Pope's ' vassal and to pay tribute
Fury of for it. This was too much for all Englishmen, and the
men.1Sh country fairly boiled over with rage.
The Yet Rebellion' was a dreadful thing. John was rich,

lead the P°werful, and held all the important castles of England
revolt of in his own hands. The man who gave the English
nation barons courage to resist was the very man over whom
1214, 1215. all this fuss had begun — Stephen Langton. He called
meetings of the leading barons, and either drew up or
got them to draw up a list of their grievances and those
of other classes of Englishmen. This document was to
be taken to the King and, if he refused to listen, the

The Great Charter

73

barons were to rebel. Nearly all the towns and most of

the churchmen were on their side ; yet they were only

able to raise a little army of 2,000 men. Luckily John

again lost his head and agreed to all their demands.

The document which they presented to him at Runny- The Great

mede, near Windsor, in June, 1215, and which he ^j^Jjj1

signed (or rather, sealed), was called 6 Magna Charta ' —

the 6 Great Charter of Liberties \

John soon repented of signing it, sent for his hireling
soldiers, sent to his 6 Holy Father 9 the Pope (who at once
absolved him from his oath to observe the Charter, and
hurled dreadful curses at the rebel barons), and scat-
tered the little national army like chaff before him. In
despair some of the barons took the foolish step of calling
in Prince Louis of France and offering him the English
crown. But within fifteen months England was saved.
John, having grossly overeaten himself one night at Death of
Newark Abbey, died suddenly in October, 121(5. iou?9

If you will consider the Great Charter for a few contents
minutes you >vill see what a lone road towards union of the

. , Great

and peace England had travelled since the last barons' charter,
rebellion in 1174. In that year the fight had been one
of barons against king and people ; now it was one of
barons and people against king. All classes of the
nation suffered, and had called on the barons to lead
them. They could not have done this if the barons had
still held their lands in Normandy ; and so it was
the loss of those lands that finally made the barons
Englishmen.

The nation had grown up; it had 'come of age'.
What it Avanted was to make its king give security that
he would not oppress it in future. So, by the Great
Charter, it proposed to ' tie his hands ' in several ways.

74

KING 30HN SIGNS THE qREAT CHARTER.

The Great Charter

He is not to lew any more land-taxes without calling his
Great Council of all the great landowners (barons and
others), and asking their consent. He is not to exact
higher payments of rent or of other customary dues than
earlier kings did. He is to pay his debts to his creditors.
His courts of justice shall sit regularly, as those of
Henry II and Richard had sat ; and they shall sit in
a fixed place instead of rambling over England and
France in the train of the King. [This ' fixed place*
came to be Westminster.] All free men shall be entitled
to a fair trial, and shall not be deprived of their land
without a fair trial. The great abuses of the game
laws shall be abolished.

And so on. No doubt to many of the barons of this
year, 1215, it was their own grievances of which they
were thinking most — the grinding taxes, the loss of
their Norman lands, their cruelly murdered kinsfolk.
But in order to get these grievances redressed they
were obliged to ask also for the redress of the grievance s
from which other classes were suffering ; even ' villeins'
are carefully protected by one of the articles of the
Charter; even to the hated Scots and Welsh i justice'
is to be done. To the Church much more than justice
is to be done; it is to be 'made free', which, I fear,
means that the kings arc not to appoint its bishops.
But later kings always found a way of avoiding this
restriction.

The Reeds of Runnymede.

At Runnymede, at Runnymede, Runny-
What say the reeds at Runnymede ? mede.

The lissom reeds that give and take, 1215.

That bend so far, but never break,

They keep the sleepy Thames awake
With tales of John at Runnymede.

John

At Runnymede, at Runnymecle,

Oh hear the reeds at Runnymede : —

' You mustn't sell, delay, deny,

A freeman's right or liberty,

It wakes the stubborn Englishry,
We saw 'em roused at Runnymede !

6 When through our ranks the Barons came,
With little thought of praise or blame,
But resolute to play the game,

They lumbered up to Runnymede ;
And there they launched in solid line,
The first attack on Right Divine —
The curt, uncompromising " Sign ! "

That settled John at Runnymede.

' At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
Your rights were won at Runnymede !
No freeman shall be fined or bound,

Or dispossessed of freehold ground,
Except by lawful judgement found
And passed upon him by his peers ! —
Forget not, after all these years,

The charter signed at Runnymede.

And still when mob or monarch lays
Too rude a hand on English ways,
The whisper wakes, the shudder plays,

Across the reeds at Runnymede.
And Thames, that knows the moods of kings,
And crowds and priests and suchlike things,
Rolls deep and dreadful as he brings

Their warning down from Runnymede !

Henry John's heir wras a bov of nine years, who was to reign

III 1216- .

72.' ~ for fifty-six years as Henry III. A wise Regent was

quickly chosen for him, William Marshall, Earl of Pern-

Character of Henry III 77

broke ; the French prince was still in the land, but his

friends soon deserted him, and he was glad to make

a treaty and go away. The Pope supported the new The

government, for by John's submission the young King {^Pop-

had become his 'vassal'. The Pope expected to make

a good thing out of it, and he intended Henry to help

him, which Henry, when he grew up, was only too ready

to do. For the King, with many good qualities, such as Character

piety and mercy, with much learning and good taste for yj- Henry

art and building, was quite un-English. He was the

first king, since Edward the Confessor, who had leaned

wholly upon foreign favourites and despised his own

sturdy people. He was frightfully extravagant, and

a natural, though not an intentional liar. England was

to him only a very rich farm, out of which he could

squeeze for himself and our 'Holy Father' the Pope at

Rome, cash, more cash, and ever more and more cash.

His own share of it he spent on building beautiful

churches, such as Westminster Abbey, and in useless

wars with his noble overlord, King Louis IX of France,

who always beat him, but allowed him to retain

Southern Aquitaine, that is, Gascony. Down till about

1232 Henry governed by native English or Norman

ministers ; and, so long as Langton lived, the Pope did

not interfere much. But soon after that the King's Extrava-

extravagance and the Popes increasing demands for fjfenry

money began to be felt, and the nation grumbled. The III,

barons were now thorough Englishmen, who had no

interests outside England at all. They began to wonder

whether Magna Charta was a mere bit of waste paper

or not ; the King observed few of its provisions, though he

constantly sw ore to observe them. In fact, he published

it at the beginning of his reign with several important

78

Remon-
strance
of the
barons.

National
rising,
J 257-65.

Simon cle
Montfort.

Prince
Edward
learns a
lesson.

articles omitted. Yet it was difficult to catch him out.
He was not in the least a 6 gory tyrant \ like his father ;
he simply maddened every one by his useless extrava-
gance, by never paying his debts, and by never keeping
his promises. At last the barons found that lie had
promised the Pope an enormous sum of money, in
return for which the Pope had promised to one of
Henry's sons the crown of Sicily. Sicily, forsooth !
What had England to do with an island in the Mediter-
ranean, while French pirates were burning the towns on
our south coast without a single King's ship being sent
to prevent them ?

This was in 1257. The barons met the King in
council after council and utterly refused to pay a
penny for the Sicilian job. Endless documents were
drawn up for the King to sign. He signed them quite
readily, promised whatever he was asked, but never
kept his word. The chief spokesman of the barons was
one Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. The nation
and all the best of the churchmen rallied heartily to
Simon's side, especially the men of London, and things
ended in a kind of war ; wherein, at the battle of Lewes
in 1264, the King and his eldest son, Prince Edward, fell
into Earl Simon s hands. For a year Simon governed
in the King's name ; but he was a hot-headed and rather
grasping man, and quarrelled with his own best sup-
porters. He even called in the aid of the Welsh. At
last Prince Edward escaped from captivity, rallied his
father's friends, defeated and slew Simon at Evesham,
and put his father back on the throne. Little venge-
ance was taken ; and the last seven years of Henry's
reign were peaceful, so peaceful indeed, that, though
Prince Edward was away in Palestine when Henry died

The Friars in England 79

in 1272, no one questioned his right to be crowned king
when he returned.

Two things rendered Henry's long reign memorable : The
the coming of the Friars, and the beginning of Parlia- ^uglMid1
ineiit. The Friars were the last offshoot of the dying
tree of monkery. Wise people began to see that
a monk who shut himself up in a monastery might no
doubt save his own soul, but could do little for the
souls of other people. What Avas wanted was men
who could go about in the world preaching and doing
good. Two great men, St. Dominic, a Spaniard, and
St. Francis, an Italian, founded brotherhoods of 'Friars'
(the word means brothers), who were to fulfil this
mission. It was a splendid ideal, and St. Francis is one
of the most beautiful figures in history. The Friars
came and lodged with the very poor in the filthy slums,
and did such work as our clergy are doing to-day in all
great cities. Others walked all over the land, preaching
in the streets and villages. But soon this movement
also began to fall ; for pious laymen heaped lands and
riches on these brotherhoods, until in little more than
a century they had become as rich and as worldly as
the monks. Moreover, the ordinary parish and town
priests, who suffered even more than the laymen from
the greedy demands of the Pope, began to think of
monks and friars alike as mere agents of the Pope, as
something foreign to the 'national Church Hence,
after 1300, there were few gifts of land to monks or
friars ; people preferred rather to found schools and Schools
colleges. Both at Oxford and Cambridge colleges had ^negLS
been founded before that year.

The second thing, the beginning of Parliament, is The Germ
even more important. Ever since Magna Charta had of Parh 1

1 ° merit.

80

Henry III

been signed the idea that the nation ought in some
way to control the King was in the air ; and the question
was what shape this control should take. As you know,
Parliament to-day consists of two Houses, Lords and
The Commons. The House of Lords is a direct descendant
House of Gf tjie barons of the thirteenth century. The eldest son

J-jorcls

of a baron, earl, marquis or duke inherits the right to
receive from the King a letter calling him by name to
Parliament whenever it meets. The King can 'create'
a man a baron, and the creation carries with it this
right to receive the letter of summons. Perhaps there
were nearly two hundred great barons in Henry Ill's
reign ; there are now over six hundred. The bishops
always received a similar letter of summons, and, until
the Reformation, so did the leading abbots. It was in
the reign of Henry III that this Great Council began
to take its shape. The King no doubt disliked it, for
he disliked all control, and its business certainly was
to control him. But he found that he could not do
without it.

The The origin of the House of Commons is quite different.

House ot jf to-day, also has over six hundred members, chosen

Com- 7

mons. from different towns and districts of the United
Kingdom, by all persons who have the right to vote.
Now, before the end of the reign of Henry II, as
I told you, the King had been in the habit of sending
officials into each county and town to consult with the
chief landowners and citizens, and to discover what
amount of taxes that county or city could bear. These
people met in the old Saxon court of justice, called the
' County Court ', to which all free landowners ought to
come ; and they elected i knights ' or gentlemen to
speak for them. In Henry Ill's reign the brilliant idea

The First Parliaments 81

occurred to somebody, 'Why not send these elected
knights or gentlemen to meet the King himself in some
general assembly ? Each of them can speak for his own
county, and the King will get a fair idea of what
amount of money the whole of England is able to
give him. 9

Now no general assembly other than that of the Great The first
Council of barons existed, so the elected knights from ^nts in
the counties and the elected citizens from the towns the reign

of H 4nr

used occasionally to be called to the Great Council, and in. tmy
there met the barons and the King. Then there would
be a great Talking or ' Parliamentum 1 (French parler,
to talk). Such knights and citizens would naturally
grow bolder when they found themselves met together,
and found that the barons were much the same sort of
fellows as themselves, and had the same ideas about the
Kings extravagance and his ridiculous foreign wars.
It was on such occasions that they thoroughly realized
that the barons were their natural leaders. Soon, they
too would begin to present petitions about the griev-
ances of their districts, and to beg the King to make
particular laws. Earl Simon has got much fame because,
while he was ruling in 12(35, there met, for the first
time, in one assembly, barons, bishops, abbots, * knights
of the shire' and citizens. You will see in the next
chapter how Edward I shaped these assemblies into
regular Parliaments, and what powers they won for
themselves.

My Father's Chair.

There are four good legs to my Fathers Chair —

Priest and People and Lords and Crown.

I sit on all of 'em fair and square,

And that is the reason it don't break down.

1134 F

82

r III

I won't trust one leg, nor two, nor three,
To carry my weight when I sit me down,
I want all four of 'em under me —
Priest and People and Lords and Crown.

I sit on all four and I favour none —
Priest, nor People, nor Lords, nor Crown —
And I never tilt in my chair, my son,
And that is the reason it don't break down !

When your time comes to sit in my Chair,
Remember your Father's habits and rules,
Sit on all four legs, fair and square,
And never be tempted by one-legged stools !

CHAPTER V

THE THREE EDWARDS, 1272-1377

Edward I, II and III (notice the grand old Saxon
name ; we are all one people now) may be called
Edward the Lawgiver, Edward the Poltroon, Edward
the Knight. The greatest of these was Edward L

He ranks with the half-dozen greatest 6 makers of Edward T,
England ', with Alfred, William the Conqueror, Henry II,
Henry VIII, Elizabeth and Victoria the Great. I should,
indeed, say 6 makers of Britain', for it was Edward who
planned, and almost carried out, the union of the whole
island under one crown. It was he who gave the abiding
shape to our Parliament, who dealt the first suc cessful
blow to the pretensions of the Pope, and who first armed
his soldiers with the all-conquering long-bow. His care
for our coast defences was an example to his descen-
dants. His legal reforms were hardly less than those
of Henry II, and, at the end of his reign, the law of
England and the law courts of England had taken the
shape that they bore down to the nineteenth century.

Edward I was a brave, truthful, honourable man, of His
rather narrow sympathies, and could be very cruel to chaiacteri
his foes. He had learned much from his father s
muddled reign ; he would engage in no rash foreign
adventures to please the Pope or any one else. Of and his
course, he must defend his one foreign possession, task*
Gascony ; and he fortified it very strongly. Occasion-
ally he was obliged to fight King Philip IV of France,
but that was because that cunning gentleman was trying
to swallow not only Gascony but also little Flanders, which

F 2

84

* EDWARD I.\S V/ARS VlTH TR^ WELSH —
Ifoid the King vsHavecl {he Tw<lsHi)^ of his merv

Conquest of Wales

85

was now the most important market for English wool, and
also because Philip was helping Edward s enemies the
Scots. What Edward himself was really set upon was the
union of Wales and Scotland to England. With Wales Conquest

of Wales

he was finally successful. After two or three long and 12g2.
patient campaigns, full of painful marches and costly
castle-building, he managed to shut up Llewellyn, the
last 6 Prince of North Wales in the mountainous dis-
trict of Snowdon ; and when Llewellyn was killed in
a skirmish, Edward organized Wales into counties with
regular sheriffs, judges and law courts, all under the
English crown. From that time the eldest son of the
King of England has always borne the title of 1 Prince
of Wales'. The first Englishman to be Prince of Wales
could at least speak no English when the title was given
to him, for he was only a few hours old But the King
stained his victory by the cruel execution of a Welsh
prince, David, who, after all, had only done what all
Celtic princes had been doing for centuries, namely,
promised to submit and then rebelled again.

With Scotland Edward just failed, and his failure Attempt
brought a terrible retribution on both countries. For qu^n"
nearly a century before this time Scotland had been at Scotland,

. ]*294-l,S<»7

peace with England, and its southern half had been
growing richer and happier. Many Norman and English Pms-
barons owned lands on both sides of the border and so ReriAy °f

Scotland

were 6 vassals' of the kings of both countries. Even before

Edward.

the Scottish King held a small English earldom, and yl wars<
for that he was, of course, the ' vassal ' of King Edward.
But the crown of Scotland he held from God alone, as
Edward held the crown of England.

King Alexander III of Scotland died in 1 286, leaving an Contest
infant grand-daughter known as the 'Maid of Norway \ for the

86

Edward I

Scottish

crown,

1290.

Edward's
attack on
Scotland,
1294.

William
Wallace.

The

'Border'
and the
Border-
wars, 1300
1550.

Edward at once proposed to marry her to his eldest
son. Nothing could have been better for both king-
doms, and all reasonable Scots would have welcomed
a union. But in 1290 the baby queen died, and at
once there was a dispute for the crown between several
great Scottish barons. They appealed to Edward, and
in their appeal acknowledged him to be ' overlord' of
Scotland. He gave his decision in favour of J ohn Balliol,
who was duly crowned at Scone as King of Scotland.

Then, in his new capacity as overlord, Edward began
to bully Balliol and to treat Scotland as if it were
already a part of England. Balliol was a weak crea-
ture, and threw himself into the arms of Philip of
France, who saw a splendid opportunity of diverting
Edward from Flanders and Gascony by aiding the Scots.
So was founded the great alliance between France and
Scotland which was to last for over two hundred years.
Edward thereon declared Balliol deposed and sent men
to conquer Scotland. He only succeeded in rousing
every Scottish heart to desperate resistance. Of this
resistance a small landowner, called William Wallace,
was the first hero. Edward, with his mailed knights
and his terrible archers, gave Wallace and the Scots
a severe thrashing at Falkirk (1298), but he could not
hunt down a whole nation in that wild hill country.
During the nine years between the battle of Falkirk
and Edward's death it became a war to the knife
between the two nations, which ten years before had
been ready to lie down like lambs together.

The result was that, for fifty miles on each side of the
Border, the land became a desert, through which swept,
almost yearly, fierce raids from either country ; and this
state of things continued far into the sixteenth century.

Edward's Attack on Scotland 87

Every Scot whom Edward caught he would hang as a

traitor (Wallace was hanged in 1305), which was quite

a new practice in foreign or even in civil Avar, wherein

there had been a great deal of ' live and let live'

on either side. Like other narrow and upright men,

Edward failed to see that those who resisted him could

be as upright as himself. Yet he was such a good

soldier and so patient that he had very nearly finished

off the conquest of all Southern Scotland when he died

on his last campaign in 1307. 'Carry my bones into

battle against them/ were his last instructions, 1 and on

my tomb carve " Edward, the hammer of the Scots".'

But it was too late ; Scotland had just found a deliverer Robert

Bruce

in Robert Bruce, a baron of Norman descent, who was j£ing
crowned at Scone in 130G as King Robert L i306lam1.

Great as a warrior and imperialist, Edward was even inward
greater as a lawgiver and organizer. All his laws ob- TsParlia-
tained the full sanction of the now regularly constituted men s*
'House of Lords'. The House of Commons generally
met at the same time, and was made up of over two
hundred borough-members and seventy-four knights of
the shire. It had, at first, no share in the law*makingt
but it constantly petitioned in favour of particular laws.
The clergy, after a short struggle, preferred not to be
represented in Parliament except by their bishops and
great abbots, who sat with the Lords ; but Edward al-
lowed them to keep two assemblies called 'Convocations',
one in the Archbishopric of Canterbury and one in
that of York. These bodies voted taxes for the clergy
to pay, just as Lords and Commons voted them for the
laymen to pay.

The House of Lords also became the chief law court His Law-
to which you could 'appeal' from all the three 'com-

88

Edward I

mon' law courts, which were now fixed at Westminster
with a separate staff of judges for each. In some cases,
if you couldn't get justice anywhere else, you might go
to the King himself, who would order his Chancellor to
look into your case ; and that was the beginning of the
' Court of Chancery \ The Chancellor was the greatest
official in the kingdom and kept the Kings 6 Great
Seal', with which all legal documents must be sealed.
One of the most useful laws which Edward made was
called i Mortmain forbidding people to leave more
lands to the Church, which was growing a little too
powerful. Another was the 6 Statute of Winchester
a great measure for compelling all men to help in
keeping the peace ; it created ' police-constables ' (with
whom, as friends or foes, most boys are still familiar)
in every town and village. Another was a law allowing
His heavy the free sale and division of great estates of land. In
all his laws, as in all his wars, we may say that Edward,
like Henry II, took his people into his confidence, which
is the secret of good government. It was expensive, as
all good government must be ; and, as no one likes paying
taxes, there was once a sort of outbreak, both of barons
and clergy, against the expense of it. Edward was very
angry, but he gave way and confirmed Magna Charta,
with the additional promise added that he would take
no new taxes without consent of his full Parliament.
Riches of He kept his promise. ' Pactum serva ' (Keep troth)
growth Avas m°tto. Indeed the country was now able to
wool. bear heavy taxes. Early in the twelfth centurv an order
of monks called ' Cistercians ' had begun to devote them-
selves to breeding sheep on a great scale, in order to sell
wrool ; and England at the end of the thirteenth century
was the greatest wool-growing country in the world. We

Edward's Quarrel with the Pope 89

did not yet know how to weave fine cloth, so our wool was The wool
all exported to Flanders, and Parliament said that every Fhmders?1
sack that was sent there should pay the King Gs. 8d.
The ' Flemings ' (men of Flanders) wove the cloth and
sent it all over Europe. This trade made it more
important than ever for our kings to keep the sea clear
of pirates, and Edward worked hard at this task. There
were other rich trades, such as that in wine with Bor-
deaux, and in furs and leather with North Germany ;
foreign merchants had to pay the King something for
leave to come to sell and buy, for as yet there were
very few English merchant-ships.

Edward Is quarrel with the clergy was a very short Edward
and simple affair. The English Church had been long ?wuiThe
growing more and more a part of the nation and less jX^f'
and less dependent on the Pope, But still the Pope
was the head of all European churches, and had to be
obeyed if possible. In 121X5 Tope Boniface VIII startled
the whole of Europe by absolutely forbidding any clergy-
man to pay any taxes to any king. It was only a few
years since Edward had got his regular system of taxing
the clergy comfortably arranged He and the King of
France rose in wrath against this absurd suggestion.
Edward simply told his clergy that he would put them
' out of law ' (i. e. withdraw all legal protection from them)
if they obeyed the Pope ; and he seized all their wool by
way of precaution. They very soon gave way. The King
of France went much further; he sent men to ltalv who The decay
maltreated the haughty Tope, and the Pope died, perhaps p0pes,
in consequence of the rough handling he got. He put a iaoo-1500.
creature of his own on the Papal throne, and compelled
him to come and live in, or close to France. For seventy
years this ' Captivity' of popes lasted (1305-78), and,

90

Edward II

Death of
Edward I,
1307.

Edward
II, 1307-
27o

His idle-
ness and
extrava-

gancee

The Earl
of Lan-
caster.

Decay of
the

baronage,
1300-1500.

as England was at war with France for much of that
time, the respect of Englishmen for a French Pope
was naturally slight. After the 6 Captivity ' came the
'Schism' (division) (1378-1415), during which there
were two and sometimes three persons, each calling
himself Pope. In fact the old Church of the Middle
Ages was fast going downhill.

Edward's death closes the best period of these
' Middle Ages'. From that time to the Reformation
the country, except in material wealth, did not improve.
Even the glorious foreign wars of Edward III brought
in the long run more harm than good to England.

Edward II ('the Poltroon') was a most impossible
person, heartless, ignorant, extravagant, cruel and
weak-minded. Men rubbed their eyes and said, ' Is
this creature the son of " Pactum serva " ? ' He gave
up the Scottish war at once, and, when in 1314 he was
obliged to take it up again, his enormous army got a
most thorough thrashing from the Scottish spearmen at
Bannockburn. He hung on the neck of a low-class
Gascon favourite, who made fun of the sober English
barons till they caught and killed him. Edward after-
wards took a fearful revenge on such barons as he could
catch, especially on his cousin Earl Thomas of Lancaster.
Thus began a feud between the Crown and this man's
family, which ended in the overthrow of Edward's
great-grandson Richard II and eventually in the civil
' Wars of the Roses \

The barons grew worse as well as the King — for
no one class in a country can be bad without the others
suffering ; they used the meetings of Parliament to
carry on their quarrels. Several of them were of royal
descent (from younger sons of Henry III and Edward I) ;

Deposition of Edward II

91

these had married great English heiresses, and began to
fight each other for lands and earldoms. The King
seemed to be at their mercy. At last, in 1327 a Deposi-
general rising, headed by the wicked French wife of ^^ard
Edward, swept him away and set up his son, aged II, 1327.
thirteen, as Edward III. Edward II was a bad king ;
but his deposition and murder was a bad job, because
there had been no one great national grievance, only
a lot of private ones of certain great nobles. He had
wasted his life, and in the end was deposed for nothing
in particular.

Edward III ('the Knight'), bv interesting these Edward

III 130""-

barons in his French and Scottish wars, where there 77 '
were lands and money as well as glory to be gained,
snuffed out their quarrels for nearly fifty years ; but
he, too, had several younger sons who quarrelled with
each other after his strong hand was gone.

He was a man of many different sides of character. His
He loved pageants and splendour, but he also loved ^d^^J.
hard knocks in hard fights by sea and land. lie was Karity.
merchant-king, sailor-king, soldier-king ; and Parlia-
ment's king too, for he added greatly to the power
of the House of Commons, which, when he died, had
obtained a full share in all law-making, could call the
King's ministers to account if it thought they were
misbehaving, and, in fact, was almost as powerful as the
House of Lords. It was always ready to vote Edward
enormous sums of money. Finally, Edward thoroughly
understood the needs of English trade, and he founded
English manufactures ; for it was he who invited
Flemings to come from Flanders and settle in Norwich
and teach us how to weave fine cloth.

Yet Edward has a bad name in history because he

92

Edward III

The great
French
war called
the Hun-
dred
Years'
War, 1338-
1453.

Causes of
the war.

Edward
claims to
be King of
France,
1340.

The

English

nation

supports

him.

plunged England into that great war with France
which lasted off and on for 100 years. In the begin-
ning, I think, he could hardly help fighting. At the
best of times England and France were rather like
two fierce, well-fed dogs, the doors of whose kennels
looked right into each other. Edward had wisely
begun his reign with several serious attempts to conquer
Scotland, and had won a great battle at Halidon Hill
in Berwickshire, while, all the time, French help was
being poured into Scotland. Then, again, the French
never ceased their attempts to eat up our old ally,
Flanders, now more than ever necessary to English
trade. Finally, no English king of any spirit could
refuse to defend Gascony, our one foreign possession.
The war opened with a great English victory on the seas,
at Sluys off the River Scheldt (1340) ; and, just before
this victory, Edward had been persuaded by the Flemings
to come to their help on land and to take the title of
6 King of France '. By English law his claim to the
French crown would have been a good one, because
his mother was the daughter of King Philip IV, but
French law did not recognize that a man could inherit
a kingdom through his mother. However, from this
time forward until 1802, all English kings called them-
selves ' Kings of France' and put the French Lilies
beside the English Leopards on their Royal Standard.
This was the most expensive piece of gardening on
record, but the war gave the English a long experience
in hard knocks which stood them in good stead.

Edward had in him a good deal of the ' knight-
errant', the sort of brave, reckless rider who was
supposed to go about seeking adventures, rescuing
ladies in distress, and cutting the throats of giants.

Edward's Claim to France 93

But he had also a rich kingdom at his back and plenty
of fighting barons, knights and freeholders, as greedy of
adventures as himself. His subjects, in fact, urged
him on and gloried in his splendid series of victories.

Boundary of Henry ll's possessions *^Ma t,

English possessions at accession of Edward III ["□[Gal:
English possessions after Treaty of Bretigny | L Z3

-.US*1

£fl(J Cherb

A&incoui

n 6 I

C ^ an Diep5«

FRANCE

English
o 20 40 60

.9

Mediterranean Sea

Emery Walker sc.

Perhaps you are disappointed that I am not going to
describe any of his great battles or rides through
France; but I had much rather that you learned why
a King of England was fighting in France than the
dates of the battle of Crecy (1346) or Poitiers (1356). Cray?0*
In the open field, up to 1361, we werealwavs victorious. ]^P\

x*)i tiers

This was because the English leaders, including the 1356.

94

Edward III

The Black
Prince ;
his gallant
boldiers.

Use of the
long-bow.

Capture
of Calais,
1347.

Peace of

Bretigny,

1361.

King himself, his noble son called the ' Black Prince',
Chandos, Manny, Knollys, and many others thoroughly
understood ' tactics ' — that is to say, they knew how to
move their men on the battle-field. The French used
to huddle too many heavy-armed knights, whether on
horse or foot, into too small a space, and trusted to
crushing the English by mere weight of numbers. But
it is an old saying that 6 the thicker the hay is, the more
easy it is to mow it '. The French light infantry was
contemptible and was despised by its own knights ;
whereas our sturdy yeomen, armed with the long-bow,
were the first line of every English force and could
pour in such showers of arrows as neither horses nor
men could face. Then our cavalry could charge in after
the arrows had blinded or frightened whole battalions
of the enemy.

In the course of the w ar Edward captured the great
city of Calais, which, as you know, is right opposite
Dover. He wanted, or said that he wanted, to hang six
of the principal citizens of Calais, for the city had made
a desperate resistance and cost him much trouble ; but his
good Queen Philippa begged them off. By the posses-
sion of Calais we got command of the 'narrow seas' as
we had never had it before, and Edward III might well
put the picture of a ship on his new gold coins, to show
that he was ' Sovereign of the Seas '. We held Calais for
200 years. After more than twenty years of war Flanders
was free from the French, Gascony was safe, and, though
Scotland was as unconquered as ever, a Scottish king
had been taken prisoner at the battle of Neville's Cross
near Durham (1346), and a French king at the Battle
of Poitiers. A peace was concluded in 1361, which left
Edward in full possession of all the old inheritance of

The Pestilence

95

Henry IFs wife (Eleanor of Aquitaine), as well as of
Calais.

France had been harried from end to end ; but so The
had Northern England by the Scots. And, though our of 1348-9.8
country was gorged with French gold, it was by no
means happy. The Avar had in fact become a war of
plunder, which is the worst kind of war. And in 1348
a pestilence, called the Black Death, had swept oft*
more than a third of the population of England, which
early in the century had perhaps reached four millions.
The exceedingly dirty habits of our ancestors had fre-
quently caused epidemics of various horrible diseases,
but never before upon such a scale. No doubt Results of
this Plague was brought by travellers and goods fence^n"
coming from the East. All Western Europe suf- life and

o ji i rt r j i i labour.

lered, but England perhaps worse than any country.
The * villein ' class was certainly diminished by one
half ; and so landowners could no longer get their
labour-rents, or, indeed, get their land tilled at all.
Prices doubled everywhere, and the few villeins that
were left demanded enormous wages for a little
work. All the 'feudal' ties which had bound village
life together were snapped. Men began to wander
'in search of work ' from the old home where thev had
been born and where their ancestors had lived from
earliest Saxon days. Landowners, finding they could
get no reapers or threshers, began to sell their land, or
take to sheep farming, which wants few hands. Parlia-
ment went on saying : 'Oh ye villeins, you shall work
for the old wages ; oh ye landowners, you shall not pay
higher ones/ But it was not a bit of good. There was
a great deal of work to be done ; there were very few
men to do it, and those men asked and received higher

96

Edward III

Last years
of Edward
III, 1367-
77.
The

Spanish

War, 1367-
70.

Death of
the Black
Prince,
1376 ;

and of
Edward
III, 1377.

wages. For a year or two it seemed as if society would
come to an end.

Then, sloAvly, things got a little better, but, as you shall
hear, there was a fierce rebellion of the peasants in the
next reign. Edward Ill's last years were unhappy. His
son, the Black Prince, governed Aquitaine, and was be-
guiled by a Spanish scoundrel, called King Pedro, to inter-
fere in a Spanish civil war. Wherever the Prince and his
archers fought they won, but his army suffered dread-
fully from the climate. A new King of France took
the opportunity to renew the great war (1369). His
captains had been learning tactics from their English
foes by the simple process of being beaten till they
understood how to hit back, and slowly and patiently
began to win back castles and frontier provinces in
Aquitaine. The Black Prince, sore stricken with fever,
turned every now and then, like a dying leopard, and
tore his victorious foes, but in vain. He died in 1376 ;
and his father, King Edward, worn out with hard
battles and also with luxurious living between cam-
paigns, died in the next year. The heir was little
Richard, son of the Black Prince, aged eleven. Two
greedy and unscrupulous uncles, John of Gaunt, Duke
of Lancaster, and Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, were
glaring at the boy and at each other. So the great
reign closed in gloom and fear for the future.

CHAPTER VI

ins

THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES ; RICHARD II
TO RICHARD III, 1377-1485

As we go on in English history each period seems to The
have a character of its own. The twelfth century, in ilftti?^rhn

* ' century, a

spite of Stephen's reign, is hopeful ; the thirteenth is miserable
• • time

glorious, rich and fairly peaceful. In the fourteenth
begins a decline, of which it is difficult to explain all
the causes ; both men and classes have begun to Snarl
at each other. In the fifteenth, the period now before
us, they are going to bite each other; the century
seems to be a failure all round.

The nation at large was by no means rotten; but The old
men's sense of right and wrong had been corrupted by ESjSj
the French and Scottish wars. Too much fighting is as up.
bad for men as too little. Also they were losing their
faith in the Church, which had ceased to be the pro-
tector of the poor and thought mainly of keeping its
enormous riches safe. Men were soon to lose their faith
in the Crown as well, and even in the Law. In a rude
state of society, when the barons were again becoming
too rich and too powerful, and the Crown becoming too
poor and too weak, the excellent system of government
by Parliament, and even the excellent law courts,
were of very little use ; the barons used both for their
own ends, and they kept armed men to enforce their
views.

In those days armies were only raised for particular The

campaigns, and, when peace came, were disbanded ;

and the soldiers, who had perhaps been fighting for earla and

baions.

11M <i

98

Richard II

ten years in France, were not likely to be peaceful
wheii they came home. So they used to attach them-
selves to some great lord or baron, who would employ
them in his private quarrels. The numbers of the
barons were now very small, but each was propor-
tionately more powerful ; and a great man might per-
haps hold four or five earldoms. The younger sons of
the kings held many of these, and were often the worst
rowdies at the fashionable game of 4 beggar-my-neigh-
bour ' and ' king of the castle '. In my schoolboy days,
when we were asked what we knew of any particular
baron in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, we usually
thought it safe to answer, 6 He was the King's uncle
and was put to death/ Most of the Kings uncles and
cousins were put to death, and more of them deserved
to be.

As regards the mere 6 politics 9 and wars of the hun-
dred and eight years from the accession of Richard II
to the death of Richard III, there is little that you
need remember.

Richard Richard II had many good qualities, but he was rash
99 his and hot-headed ; while he was a boy his uncles and
character, some four or five other great barons were always trying
to rule in his name ; when they found this difficult,
they conspired against him and killed his best friends.
When he came of age they despised him because he
kept the peace with France, whereas they and their
plundering followers had enjoyed the war. Richard,
however, M as no coward, and when he was not yet fifteen
he had a fine opportunity of showing his pluck. In 1381
the question of the wages of farm labourers, which had
been so much upset by the Black Death in 1348, led to
a fearful outbreak called the ' Peasant Revolt ' (1381) all

The Peasant Revolt 99

over the richest lands of England. It was headed by one The
Wat Tyler ; London was occupied by the rebels, and ^^£fc
king and courtiers had to fly to the Tower. Again the 1381.
ship of state seemed in danger of foundering. But the
peasants lacked real leadership, young King Richard II
(he was then fourteen) showed the greatest pluck ;
Tyler was killed, and the revolt was put down, not
without a good deal of hanging. When that was over
men's eyes began to open to the fact that new con-
ditions of life had begun. 6 Villeinage ' was dead ; the
only labourers left were free labourers, who naturally
would bargain for the highest wages they could get
Also, much land had ceased to be ploughed and had
gone back into pasture for sheep. For wool increased
in value every year, and sheep need few hands to
guard them.

But for the rest of his reign the King was cither Richard's
chafing against his uncles and their friends, or else >10J^J!i°

y & 7 in 139i.

planning schemes of vengeance against them. In 1397,

after long waiting, he struck swiftly at the leaders

of the barons, killing his uncle Thomas and banishing

his cousin Henry of Lancaster (son of John of Gaunt,

Edward Ill's third son). Then he got Parliament to

pass certain Acts which gave him almost absolute

power, and all sober men, who reverenced both the

Crown and the ' Constitution ' (which, roughly speaking,

means government through Parliament), stood aghast

at this.

In 1399 Henry of Lancaster returned, accused Richard Henry,
of misgovernment, deposed him and perhaps had him Lancaster
murdered. He then took the crown, and for fourteen becomes
years tried to rule England as King Henry IY, but as Henry
without much success. The very barons who had aided j}^1399-

g 2

100 Henry V

him to usurp the throne said he did not reward them
enough ; they rose against him, and a sort of civil war
began in 1403 and smouldered on for three or four
years. Henry was not a bad fellow personally ; he was
devoted to the Church, and the Church supported him ;
so did the House of Commons, which got much power
in his reign. But to keep order, the first task of a king,
Henry V, was too hard a task for him. He died in 1413. His
1413-22. gon uenry y? equally devoted to the Church, was a
much stronger and cleverer man ; there was no civil
war in his short reign. But this was mainly because
he put all his energies into renewing the war with
France.

His This really was wicked ; whatever right Edward HI

France°n m^ht have had to the French crown, Henry V could
1415. have none, for he was not the best living heir of
Edward III. The Earl of March was the best living-
heir of Edward III, for he was descended from Edward's
second son, King Henry V only from his third ; but
March had been quietly shoved aside when Henry IV
seized the English crown. However, France was in
a worse condition than England ; her king, Charles VI,
was mad, and her great nobles were rearing each other
and their beautiful country to pieces. Henry V saw
his opportunity and used it without mercy or remorse.
He probably thought that such a war would at least
draw away all the baronial rowdies and their followers
from England, and it did. Henry set about the busi-
His fieet ness of making war in the most practical manner. We
anc guns. Qwe ^m Qne grea^ blessing ; he was the first king

since the Conquest who began to build a Royal fleet,
as distinguished from the fleet of the Cinque Ports
(which he also kept going) ; he was the first to use guns

101

ENGLISH 7VRCHE.RY WINS AT /AOINCOVRT

102 Henry V

on a large scale, both on his ships and with his land
army. Guns and gunpowder had been knowTn before the
middle of the fourteenth century, but so far had been
little used. Their use explains Henry's success in his
sieges in France, for with big guns you can batter doAvn
stone walls pretty quickly, whereas Edward III had
spent eight months over the taking of Calais, which he
only won by starving it out.

The French towns defended themselves gallantly,
but, before his death, Henry had managed to conquer
all Normandy, and had even reached the River Loire.
Battle of But his great feat was the glorious battle of Agincourt,
court" won aSainst enormous odds in 1415. Finally in 1420
1415. he got hold of the poor mad Charles VI, entered Paris
Treaty of with him and compelled him to conclude the Treaty of
K2(feS' Troyes, by which he, Henry, should succeed to the
French crown and marry the French princess Katharine.
Death of Then, in the flower of his age, and leaving to an infant
Henry V, 0f njne months old the succession to both crowns, he
died in 1422.

Henry VI, There was one good c king's uncle', John, Duke of
Th? Duke Bedford, who did his best to keep these two crowns on
of Bed- his nephew's head ; but there were other uncles and
tinues°the cousins who were not so good. Little Henry VI .grew
French Up jn^0 a gentle, pious, tender-hearted man, who hated
wrar, hated wicked courtiers, loved only learning and
learned men, founded the greatest school in the world
(Eton), and shut his eyes to the fact that England was
getting utterly out of hand. Bedford just managed
to hold down Northern France (which had always hated
the Treaty of 1420) until his own death in 1435 ; after
that all Frenchmen rallied to their natural king,
Charles VII., The noble French c Maid of God', Joan

war.

Joan of Arc

103

of Arc, came to lead her people and inspired them with Joan of
the belief that God would fight for them if they would Arc*
fight bravely for their country. She was just a peasant-
girl of no education, but of beautiful life and well able
to stand hardship ; she believed that the Saints ap-
peared to her and urged her to deliver France. The
French soldiers came to believe it too, and she led them
to battle dressed in full armour and riding astride of
a white horse. She allowed no bad language to be used
in the army : ' If you must swear, Marshal/ she said to
one of the proudest French nobles, ' you may swear by
your stick, but by nothing else.' The English caught
her and burned her as a witch, but she lives in the
hearts of all good Frenchmen (and Englishmen) as
a saint and a heroine until this day. Step by step the The
•English were driven back till ail Normandy, all Aqui- SsfSfr,,,*

w ' m (in veil < >u l

tainc were lost, and in 1453 nothing remained to us but of France,

ri , . 1430-53.

Calais.

King Henry VI was not sorry ; by this time he knew Anprerof
how wicked his lather s attack upon Prance had been. EngHdi;
But the fighting instinct of Englishmen was desperately weakness
sore; defeat after such victories seemed unbearable. VTs *Y
And, while the barons' quarrels round the King's totter- ^fJ11"
ing throne became shriller and shriller, there were but
too many men in England ready to fight somebody, they
did not much care whom so long as there was plunder
at the end. Henry's wife, Margaret of Anjou, a fiery,
cruel woman, ignored her gentle husband and governed
in his name. She had already made herself the partisan
of one of the two baronial factions, and had struck
down the King s uncle the Duke of Gloucester. Her
favourite minister, the Duke of Suffolk, was actually
caught and beheaded by common sailors on board

#

104

YI

a King's ship as he was flying to France. What should
we say if a lot of British sailors now caught and be-
headed Mr. Asquith on board the Dreadnoughts In
Insurrec- the same year 1450 there was a fearful insurrection
JackCade *n Kent, led by a scamp called Jack Cade, who marched
1450. into London and beheaded several more of the King's

ministers. Law and order were utterly at an end.
The Duke The Duke of York, who was now the best living heir
the House °^ Edward III, at length took up the cudgels against
of York the House of Lancaster. There was civil war for some
House of s*x years (1455-61), and battle after battle. The horror
Lan- Gf an iia(j driven the good King, on two occasions, out

caster. . . T ° °' 7

of his mind. It was called the war of the House of York
against the House of Lancaster, of the 'White Rose'
against the c Red Rose ' ; really, it was the war of some
dozen savage barons on one side against another dozen
on the other. Each of them had a little army of archers
and spearmen ; each had perhaps the grudges of a century
to pay off upon some rival. The war hardly affected the
towns at all, and stopped trade very little ; and even
the country districts, except in the actual presence of
the armies, seem to have suffered little. The growth
of wool, at any rate, and with it the increase of riches,
went on as fast as ever. 'The King ought to put
a sheep instead of a ship on his coins,' was a common
saying of the day. Of course the coasts were utterly
undefended, and pirates of all sorts had a happy time in
the Channel.

Wars of If any line of division can be discovered in the country

1455R61 eS' we may say rousWy that the North and West were Lan-
castrian, the South and East (then the richest counties)
Yorkist. At last Henry VI was deposed, Queen Mar-
garet took flight, and Edward, Duke of York, became

Edward IV

105

King as Edward IV. He was a thoroughly bad man, Edward
being cruel, vindictive and, except in warfare, lazy. IV be~

° ' ... comes

But Margaret had been vindictive too, and, as regards King,
cruelty, there was little to choose between the parties ;
after every battle the leaders of the vanquished side
were put to death almost as a matter of course.

But, just as Henry IV had quarrelled with the barons The Earl

who had crowned him, so did Edward IV quarrel with ^ic^al"

his c Kingmaker' and best friend, the Earl of Warwick, called the

Warwick thereupon deposed Edward and took poor m"k|~r-

Henry VI, who had been an ill-used prisoner in the ifestora-

Tower of London, and put him back on the throne tVon °^ T

. , . Hem v \ 1,

again. It was only a six months restoration (14/0-1), ]47<» i.

for Edward returned, slew Warwick in battle, slew Edward

1\ a^ain

Henry's only son after the battle, slew all the Lan- 1471^3, '
castrian leaders he could catch, and finally had King
Henry murdered in the Tower. After this he ' reigned
more fiercely than before'; he struck down his own
brother George, Duke of Clarence ; he employed spies,
tortured his prisoners, and hardly called Parliament at
all ; he took what taxes he pleased from the rich, lint
he kept order very little better than Henry VI had
done. Once he thought he Mould play the part of
a 'fine old English king', so he led a great army across
to France in 1475, but there allowed himself to be
bribed by the cunning Louis XI to go home again with-
out firing a shot. At his death in 1483 his brother, the
hunchback Richard, seized the crown, and murdered
Edward's two sons (Ed ward \ and Richard, Duke ot Edward A'
York) in the Tower. Richard III was a fierce, vigorous p^L^a
villain, and had, in two years and a half, succeeded in 111,

1483— 5

murdering a good many nobles, both of the Lancastrian
and Yorkist parties.

106

rv VII

The Earl Finally, all the sober English leaders who still kept

momfh their heads began to send secret messages to a famous

comes to exiled gentleman, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, who

England. wag j[escende(i through his mother from the House of

Lancaster, begging him to come over from France
and upset the tyrant. He was to marry Edward I V's
daughter Elizabeth, and thus to unite the Red and White
Roses. Henry landed in South Wales with a very
small army, which increased as he marched eastwards.
Battle of He met King Richard, defeated and slew him at Bos-
W85W°rth' WOI>th in Leicestershire, 1485. Then he advanced to
London and was received with joy and relief as King
Henry VII.

The seeds Apart from the politics and wars of this dreary period
of the there are one or two things to be noticed of much

Kerorma- . ° .

tion. greater interest for us. Every age is only preparation
for the next, and the seeds of many of the great
'awakenings' of the sixteenth century were sowed in
the fifteenth.

First, of the religious awakening. We had long been
accustomed to growl at the riches of the Church,
but, till the end of Edward Ill's reign, no one had
questioned its spiritual powers. No one had doubted
Hatred of that priests could really pardon sin. Men hated the

<rf°ther£h P°Pe> bllt no one liad yet doubted that he was the ' Head
church- 0f the Church ' any more than they had doubted that

men.

every priest performed a miracle every time he conse-
crated the Holy Sacrament. Few had even questioned
that by payment of money to Rome you could buy
salvation. But the popes, when they got back to Rome,
after the 'Great Schism' was ended in 1415, were little
more than Italian bishops, mainly occupied with wars
against their neighbours. No doubt their bark was still

Seeds of the Reformation 107

terrible, but what about their bite ? Had the}', people
wondered, any teeth left to bite with ?

At the end of Edward Ill's reign the great English John
scholar, John Wyclif, began to ask questions about all y
these things, and to argue that the favourite doctrines
of the Roman Church were all comparatively new, that
they were not part of Christ's teaching, and could not
be found in the Bible at all. He published an English
translation of the Bible ; hitherto men had only a
Latin version of it, and the Church did not encourage
laymen to read it. He also founded an order of 6 poor
priests', who were to go about preaching simple
Christianity.

The English bishops were absolutely terrified ; and The
the monks, abbots and friars more terrified still. These ];(,llal1

7 heresy .

had long known what greedy eyes laymen cast on their
vast wealth. Wyclif, said the great churchmen, was
a £ heretic', and ought to be burned alive (lie died in
his bed all safe in 1384). In the reigns of Henry IV j£eretics
and Henry V the clergy persuaded Parliament to make burned,
laws saying that heretics should be burned alive, and
many of Wyclifs followers, during the next hundred and
twenty years, were actually so burned. The Church
nicknamed them 1 Lollards', or babblers.

The 'State', as represented by the King and Parlia-
ment, somewhat unwillingly supported the churchmen
in this matter ; yet on the whole the State considered
that these Lollards were raising dreadful questions, and
it would be better to crush them and not allow them
the safetv-valvc of talking. The Church sat on the
safety-valve as long as it could ; but the steam of free
thought was bubbling underneath, and, once it had
gathered head enough, would blow those that sat on the

Coming Changes

Changes
coming all
over
Europe.

Gun-
powder.

Printing.

Dis-
covery.

Greek
learning.

safety-valve sky-high into little tiny pieces. When Lol-
lardy bursts forth again in the reign of Henry VIII it
will be called by the better name of 1 Protestantism \

Other changes, too, were not far away. For nearly
a thousand years past the nations of Europe had been
considered as one great family, of which the Pope and,
since 800, some hazy German king who called himself
' Roman Emperor ' were supposed to be the two heads ;
other kings were, or ought to be, vassals of these two.
The Kings of England and France had never really ad-
mitted these large claims, and that was why England and
France were ahead of other nations. But all these
ideas were out of date ; the spirit of the Crusades was
dead, the commercial rivalry of great nations had begun.
Gunpowder was changing the face of war and was
making the strongest and heaviest armour quite useless.
The printing of books with movable type was discovered
about 1459, and, at Westminster, William Caxton
was printing English and Latin books in the reign of
Edward IV. In the same reign certain Bristol mer-
chants were sailing far into the Atlantic, to discover
half-mythical islands, of which dim stories, long for-
gotten, were now being revived and retold ; they did
not find any such islands till the reign of Henry VII
had begun. Spaniards led by Columbus were the first
to set foot in America in 1492 ; Portuguese were the first
to round the Cape of Good Hope five years later. But
the idea of new worlds to be discovered was in the air.
Finally, the Turks had taken Constantinople in 1453, and
its exiles, who still spoke a sort of Greek and possessed
many manuscripts of the ancient Greek philosophers,
came to Italy and began to spread the knowledge of
Greek to Western Europe.

The Hour before the Dawn 109

Four things, then, were to change the face of the Men
world — gunpowder, printing, geographical discovery,
and Greek. They would lead men first to wonder, then
to reflect, and lastly to question — to question whether
all the tales which the Church had been telling the
world for a thousand years were true or false. Could
Becket's bones really restore a dead man to life ? Could
a priest turn bread and wine into the actual body and
blood of Christ ? Was the world really flat, and did the
sun and moon go round it, as the Church said they did ?
Might there possibly be other worlds ? You can under-
stand, then, that the end of the fifteenth century left
men rubbing their eyes, half awake and uneasy, but
thinking — thinking hard.

The Dawn Wind.

At two o'clock in the morning, if yon open your window The hour
and listen, jjefore the

You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to ( ann*
call the sun.

And the trees in the shadow rustic and the trees in the
moonlight glisten,
And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the
night is done.

So do the cows in the field. They graze for an hour and
lie down,

Dozing and chewing the cud ; or a bird in the ivy
wakes,

Chirrups one note and is still, and the restless Wind
strays on,

Fidgeting far down the road, till, softly, the darkness
breaks.

110 The Hour before the Dawn

Back comes the Wind full strength with a blow like an
angel's wing,

Gentle but waking the world, as he shouts : ' The Sun !
The Sun ! '

And the light floods over the fields and the birds begin
to sing,

And the Wind dies down in the grass. It is Day and
his work is done.

So when the world is asleep, and there seems no hope
of her waking-
Out of some long, bad dream that makes her mutter
and moan,

Suddenly, all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking,
And every one smiles at his neighbour and tells him
his soul is his own !

9

■i-AN

let*?-

.The Citie of

hundred miles W

Or 'J9 c

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f

C1PAN0U

some

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1

fall of O)

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rich. Voices <j,

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>e herm^dens

TERRA
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men

This isaMafi of MMERfCM Ond ttoe to GHlls

. sbewe<ito King HENR>

H

Here men say

compass c

INLAND

a \ mff? C There uashere
AiiHlTLBF.RE <in ISLE was turned

^ 'iZl?Uch Ice.

0*

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E Xee, futt of salvage nven

ilia

PZ.ATO
fA NT 15

■ i i • * • • »«

*4a *f

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as Mea believed it to be/) vohicb an old. PILOT

wH intbeyegr I^OO

CHAPTER VI f

THE TUDORS AND THE AWAKENING OF

ENGLAND, 1485-1603

The King's Jon

Once on a time was a King anxious to understand
What was the wisest thing a man could do for his land.
Most of his population hurried to answer the question,
Each with a long oration, each with a new suggestion.
They interrupted his meals, he wasn't safe in his bed
from 'em,

They hung round his neck and heels, and at last His

Majesty fled from em.
He put on a leper s cloak (people leave lepers alone),
Out of the window he broke, and abdicated his throne.
All that rapturous day, while his Court and his Ministers

mourned him,

He danced on his own highway till his own Policemen
warned him.

Gay and cheerful he ran (lepers don't cheer as a rule)
Till he found a philosopher-man teaching an infant
school.

The windows were open wide, the King sat down on
the grass,

And heard the children inside reciting ' Our King is an

ass \

The King popped in his head, 'Some people would call
this treason,

But I think you are right/ he said ; 'will you kindly

give me your reason ? '
Lepers in school are rare as kings with a lepers dress

on,

But the class didn't stop or stare ; it calmly went on
with the lesson :

112

The Tudors

* The wisest thing, we suppose, that a man can do for
his land,

Is the ivork that lies under his nose, with the tools that

lie under his hand.9
The King whipped oft* his cloak, and stood in his crown

before 'em.

He said : — ' My dear little folk, Ex ore parvulorum
(Which is Latin for " Children know more than grown-
ups would credit ")
You have shown me the road to go, and I propose to
tread it/

Back to his Kingdom he ran, and issued a Proclamation,
' Let every living man return to his occupation ! '
Then he explained to the mob that cheered in his palace
and round it,

'I've been to look for a job, and Heaven be praised
I've found it ! '

The six-
teenth
century ;
an awak-
ened
world.

Struggle
between
old and
new ideas.

Now we come to a very different part of history, the
period when our own modern world began to be born. It
was a dreadful period because the breaking up of the
old ideas of religion, of geography and of trade was
accompanied by great suffering to many classes and by
the loss of many noble lives of those who clung to the
old ideas. Yet it was also a splendid period because of
the close union and understanding between the new
Tudor kings and their people ; because England armed
herself to face dangers from foreign foes so resolutely
that, at the end of it, she was the first sea-power in the
world. And it was a time in which England produced
a series of really great men in every walk of life. Men's
minds were stirred up to think, and so the men with
the greatest minds came to the front ;

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways.

Character of Henry VII 113

Wyclif had done little more than prepare the bed in
which the seed was to be sown, the seed of knowledge
and of the * Spirit which giveth life'. England was, as
she is still, a deeply conservative country ; our people
were slow at taking up new ideas, and too much in love
with money. They wanted kings who would give them
peace and order, knock down the great nobles, restrict
or even abolish the Popes power. But they did not at
first want ' heresy ' or wish to break with the Catholic
Church of their fathers.

Henry VII was a king admirably suited to carry out Henry
some of these wishes. If you save him a name you M.V1 Is'

* ° J loUU ; Ins

would call him 'Ilenrv the Prudent'. He did not do task;
as did the king in the poem on page 111, nor did any
real king of whom I ever heard ; but Henry tried hard to
find out what a king's real 'job ' should be, and he set to
work to do it ; moreover, he did his best to make English-
men stop talking and fighting among themselves, and set
them to work each at his own job. I lis claim to the
throne was not a very good one, and his aim therefore
was to 1 let sleeping dogs lie '; 6 Mind your own businesses,
my dear subjects, and let me mind mine ', was what he
would have said. His main task was to heal the w ounds
left by the civil war; and, in a reign of twenty-four
years, he had almost completely healed them. There
were at first some small insurrections, after-swells of
the late storm, but they were put down with ease.
Henry called few parliaments and asked for little money, his
but heaped up treasure by other ways. He taxed rich Ciluti°n;
people, though he had no legal right to do so ; he care-
fully nursed trade and manufacture ; and he imposed
enormous fines on all big men who broke his laws,
especially his laws which forbade them to keep large

1134 II

114 Henry VIII

bands of retainers who would fight their quarrels. His
ministers and privy councillors were either bishops or
middle-class laymen ; and the Privy Council became
almost more important than Parliament. He cut off
few heads, but chose them wisely, for those he did cut
off were the most dangerous. A great monarchy was
his love of growing up in Spain as well as in France ; even
peace. Germany was trying hard to be a united country.

Henry watched them all, and made numerous treaties
with them, but refused to be led into expense or adven-
tures ; above all he avoided wars. With Scotland he
kept firm peace, the first real peace since 1290, and
he married his daughter Margaret to King James IV ;
it was the great-grandson of this marriage who, as
James I, finally united the two countries in 1603.
As for the Church, it also seemed to be wrapped in
profound peace ; the mutterings against it were all
under the surface.
The 'New Yet before Henry died, the 'New Learning', which
fou^dedg' was ^° ^eac* ^° Ref°rmation, was in full swing in
on Greek. England. Great scholars like John Colet and Thomas
More were reading the Scriptures in their original
Greek, and finding out how very much the Roman
Church differed from the earliest forms of Christianity.
The study of Greek had begun at both universities, and
English scholars were continually travelling to Germany
and Italy.

Henry In 1509 Henry died, and was succeeded by his son
; Henry VIII, aged eighteen, a most splendid young man,
his early 0f great natural cleverness and devoted to the New
Learning, but devoted also to every sort of game,
pleasure and extravagance. For the business of the
State he at first cared nothing ; 6 Oh, go and talk to my

years

•

War with Scotland

115

Chancellor about that/ he would say. His Chancellor Cardinal
was the cunning Thomas Wolsey, afterwards Cardinal, Wolsey ;

&. J 7 , * his foolish

Archbishop of York and Legate (i. e. special agent) of extrava-
the Pope. Wolsey got all power into his own hands gance#
and managed things badly. He allowed his master to
waste the treasures heaped up by Henry VII ; and,
when the King called Parliaments, they growled at this
extravagance, and refused to vote the huge sums for
which he asked them. He plunged into for eign politics, War with
and made a foolish war with France, which at once P^fH'

9 battle or

broke the long peace with Scotland; for James IV Flodden,

] 513

invaded England with a huge army, which was defeated ° '
by Henrys general, the Karl of Surrey, at Flodden
Field (1513). Wolsey realized that the Church was in
danger, both from the New Learning and from the
growing outcry against its riches, and he was most
anxious to put off any open attack on it ; but as for
reform, he had no plans.

The storm broke first in German y, where, in 1517, the The
simple monk, Martin Luther, began bv attacking some ,^1,),ma-

1 ° tion in

of the more scandalous abuses of the Church, and ended, Germany,

a year or two later, by declaring the Pope to be 'Anti- begins to

christ'. Henry VIII professed himself to be deeply g nuence

shocked at this, wrote a book in defence of the Catholic 1520-30.

doctrines, and forbade Englishmen to read Luther's

books. But these books, and many others upon the

same side, could not be kept out of England, and nothing

could prevent eager young men from reading them. By

the year 1527 there was a small but vigorous body of

scholar's in England who were prepared to attack the

teaching of the old Church as well as its riches. These The first

were soon to be called ' Protestants ' ; as yet men called . 1>1",t es

' J t tants .

them 'heretics'. Their main cry was for the Bible as

H 2

116

T VIII

the ground of all Christian teaching ; * away with every-
thing that cannot be found in the Bible/
Henry Until 1527 the Government sternly repressed every
divorce, movement against the Pope. Then a purely political
1527. event caused it to turn round. King Henry wanted to
divorce his wife Katharine, a Spanish princess, who had
been the wife of his brother Arthur. Arthur had died
in 1501. The Pope had allowed Henry to marry
Katharine, although many people had doubted whether
such a marriage could possibly be lawful. Only one
child of this marriage, Princess Mary, born 1516, had
survived, and Henry thought, or professed to think,
that this was a 6 judgement of God' on him. Also he
Anne wanted to marry some one else, the Lady Anne Boleyn,
Boleyn. one Gf Queen Katharines court ladies. He applied to
the Pope for a divorce. Popes were in the bad habit
of doing these little jobs to please kings ; but Pope
Clement VII would not do this. King Charles of Spain
and Germany, called the ' Emperor was the nephew of
Queen Katharine ; he was much the most powerful
monarch in Europe, and Clement dared not offend him.
Henry So the Pope, and Wolsey for him, shifted and twisted
Clen^nt6 an(^ turned and promised, but could not give the King

VII, of England his wishes.

15.77-9

Suddenly, to the surprise of all his courtiers,
of all England, of all Europe, Henry roared out,
' Pope ! What do I care for the Pope ? Call my
Parliament ! '

The Par- It was the year 1529. The King was thirty-eight

liamentof u j ■■ m. 1 i • i x r

1529-36. years old, and quite unknown to his people, except trom
Union of the rumours of his extravagance. Suddenly he appeared
people^ before them as their leader and friend, prepared to do
all, and more than all, on which their hearts were set.

The Church of England 117

The nation had hardly dared to whisper its desire to
curb the Pope and the Church ; here was a king who
shouted it aloud !

Do not think that I praise Henry VIII. It was a
selfish and wicked motive that started the idea in his
mind. What I say is that, once the idea was started,
he would have all the kings of Europe against him, and
no friend but his own people ; and so King and people
now became one as they had never been before.

Very few Englishmen were as yet prepared to accept What the
any new sort of Church ; most of them hated the idea ?afc^
of ' heresy \ Henry hated it also, and continued to the
end of his life to burn a few extreme heretics. King
and people wished no more than to abolish the power
of the Pope in England, to strip the Church of its
enormous wealth, and yet to remain 'good Catholics'.
Was this possible? History was to prove that it was
not ; once the Pope was pulled down in England a
' Reformation ' of all the Church in England must follow,
in spite of any effort to prevent it. Henry just managed
to stave oft* this reformation while he lived.

The Parliament of 1529 sat for seven years, and when The laws
it rose a new England had begun. How the new laws Jjj^pJ
against the Church were forced through the House of 1529-06.
Lords no one knows ; one fears it was by terror and
threats, for nearly all the bishops and certainly all the
abbots would be against them ; and of the forty-five
lay peers, a strong minority must have hated serious
changes. But the House of Commons, almost to a man,
welcomed these changes ; and that House then repre-
sented the sober country gentlemen and the sober
merchants of England.

One by one all the powers of the Pope were shorn

118

rv VIII

Arch-
bishop
Cranmer.

Monas-
teries
dissolved.

Thomas
Crom-
well ;
fierce
measures
against
the old
Church
and the
old

nobles.

Pilgrim-
age of
Grace,
1536.

away, the power of making laws for themselves was
taken from the clergy, the Church was declared to be
independent of any foreign influence, but wrholly depen-
dent on the Crown. Every one was obliged to swear
that the King was the i Head of the Church \ The new
Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, pro-
nounced the divorce from Katharine, and married his
King to Anne Boleyn ; the Princess Mary was set aside,
and when Anne's daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, was
born, she was declared heir to the throne. All the
smaller monasteries were dissolved and their lands
handed over to the Crown ; Henry gave most of them
to his courtiers and to important country gentlemen,
and so a new set of nobles, newly enriched from Church
lands and entirely dependent on the King, rapidly came
to the front.

Many of the best men in England were deeply
shocked at these changes, even some who had been
prepared to go a long way in reforming the abuses of
the Church. But Henry and his savage minister,
Thomas Cromwell, struck down every one who stood in
their path. The Courtenays and Poles, descended from
Edward IV, were imprisoned, or driven into exile, or
had their heads cut off. Sir Thomas More, once the
King's intimate friend, and Bishop Fisher of Rochester,
both men of European fame for their learning and
piety, were the most distinguished victims. In the
North of England, in 1536, a fierce insurrection broke
out called the ' Pilgrimage of Grace 9 ; the rebels cried
out for the restoration of the monasteries, for in that
wild country the monks had been the only doctors and
their houses had been open to all travellers. The
rising was put down with great cruelty, for Henry was

120

Henry VIII

naturally a cruel man, and he was now drunk with
pride and power.

He had already beheaded his second wife Anne, and
married his third, Jane Seymour ; she bore to him in
1537 a son, afterwards Edward VI, and died a few days
afterwards. In the last seven years of his life he
married three more wives, one of whom he divorced,
another he beheaded, and the third survived him.

In 1539 the remaining monasteries, even the greatest,
were dissolved and, as a result, the great abbots ceased to
attend Parliament. Some of their wealth was used to
found schools and professorships at Oxford and Cam-
bridge, and to create six new bishoprics ; but most of
it went to the nobles and gentlemen. Thus, within three
years, nearly a quarter of the land of England had got
new owners. All the great offices of state had been
wholly taken away from churchmen, and were now in
the hands of these new nobles. New ' Confessions of
Faith' (declaring what was the true teaching of the
Church of England) were published ; first the ' Ten
Articles ', then the ' Six Articles ' ; the former w as a step
in the direction of the German Protestantism ; the latter
was very nearly the old Catholic faith but without the
Pope ; and I must repeat that it was this midway position
which, as late as Henry's own death, most people in
England preferred.

But Henry had ordered an English translation of the
Bible to be placed in every parish church for every one
to read, and in 1544 he allowed the Litany to be said in
English ; this was really the beginning of our beloved
Prayer Book. And, once lay Englishmen began to read
the Bible for themselves, they would not long be con-
tent to believe in confession to a priest or in the miracle

Danger of Foreign Invasion 121

of the Mass (Jboth of which were taught in the Six
Articles).

Now all these changes were carried through under Danger of
continued danger from abroad, for of course the Pope invasion
had declared Henry to be deposed, and called on all on behalf
Catholic princes to go and depose him. Much of the p0pe.
danger was from the old alliance of France and Scot-
land, but far more from the power of Spain, Germany
and Flanders, now all in the hands of the Emperor,
Charles V. Threats of invasion were incessant, but
Henry armed his people to the teeth, and, at the end of Henry
his reign, had a navy of seventy ships ready for action. ^JSS^
He built castles all round his southern and eastern
coasts, and was always making great guns to put in
them. He knew that the few remaining descendants of
Edward III were plotting to upset his throne, especially
the exiled Reginald Pole, a great favourite of the Pope.
He had already sliced off the heads of all his royal
cousins whom he could catch. With the approval of Who

his Parliament, he had settled that the crown should go i

1 ^ o succeed

after his death to his son Edward; if Edward had no Henry?
children, to Mary ; then, if Mary had no children, to
Klizabcth ; lastly, if all three of his children died without
direct heirs, it was to go to the heirs of his younger sister,
Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, not to those of his elder
sister, Margaret, Queen of Scotland. He hated Scot-
land as bitterly as Edward I, and continued the Border
wars as fiercely until his death in 1547.

Thus you will say I have drawn for you the picture of Henry's
a monster of cruelty and selfishness? Yes, Henry was character«
just that. But he was also something* much more. He
was a great patriot, a great Englishman. He taught
Englishmen to rely on themselves and their ships ; and

122 Henry VIII

he taught future English kings to rely on their people.
He shivered in pieces the foreign yoke that had bound the
Church of England since Saint Augustine had preached

Sufferings in the open air to the early King of Kent. Great

of bh
poor.

suffering accompanied these great changes ; and they

were thoroughly bad for the moral character of the

Greed of the Kich 123

generation which saw them. The new landowners were
men who thought only of riches, and turned out the
tenants of the old monks by the score, and by the
hundred. A swarm of beggars was let loose over the
country, beggars to whom the monks had given daily
doles of bread and beer. Savage laws of whipping and
forced labour had to be passed to keep these men in
order. Moreover, since the discovery by the Spaniards Greed
of rich gold and silver mines in America, money had °? J*16
come into Europe in great floods, and this had sent up
the price of all goods at a fearful rate ; all trade seemed
uncertain ; great fortunes might be suddenly made, and
as suddenly lost. So the strong and the clever (and
often the wicked) prospered, and the weak and the old-
fashioned people were ruined.

The six years' reign of the boy Edward VI (1547- Edward
53) only made all this social misery worse. Every one XJv
had been afraid of Henry VI II ; no one was afraid of a Scramble
child of ten, though he was a clever and strong-willed of tlie

7 ° ° new

child. The result was that the government became a nobles for

scramble for wealth and power among the new nobles, j^J|r-

the Seymours, Dudleys, Russells, Herberts, Greys and

many more who had been enriched with abbey lands.

It was the fear of losing these lands and the desire of

confiscating for themselves what remained of Church

property that drove these men, quite against the wishes

of sober people, to force on a reformation of the teaching

of the Church. The result in the long run was good, They dc-

because the Protestant faith did then first get a lawful fSfJjL^

footing in England ; but the result for the moment was tion,

bad, because moderate men began to mistrust a

Reformation which seemed to be bound up with greed

for spoil and with contempt for all the past traditions of

124 Edward YI

The two
Prayer
Books of
Edward
VI, 1549
and 1552.

The Duke
of Somer-
set, Pro-
tector.

His
quarrel
with Scot-
land, 1548.

The Duke
of

Northum-
berland,
1550-3.

Violence
of the Re-
formers.

England. At the same time the leaders of the new
Protestant Church were all men of high character ;
Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer and Hooper, all Bishops of
King Edward, all died for their faith in the next reign.

However much we may rightly abuse the greedy
nobles, we can never wholly regret a reign which first
gave us the Prayer Book in English and substituted the
Communion for the Mass. Cranmer prepared two suc-
cessive Prayer Books; the second (1552) somewhat more
Protestant than the first of 1549, and it was the second
which, with very slight alterations, became our present
Prayer Book in the reign of Elizabeth. In Edward's
reign also the marriage of priests was allowed, and the
Statutes for burning heretics were abolished. In his
reign too, alas, the beautiful stained-glass windows,
statues and pictures were removed from most of our
churches, whose walls were now covered with whitewash.

Edwards first Regent or ' Protector ' was his mother's
brother, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset ; a man of
much higher character than most of the nobles, but rash
and hot-headed, and quite unfit to lead the nation. He
continued Henry's vindictive quarrel with Scotland,
Avon a great victory at Pinkie, and drove the Scots once
more into the arms of France. Their girl-queen, Mary
Stuart, who might have been a bride for our boy-king,
was sent for safety to France and married to the French
King's son. Somerset was soon upset by a much more
violent person, the ruffian John Dudley, Duke of
Northumberland, who pushed on the Reformation at
greater speed for purely selfish ends, and disgusted all
sober men with it. He brought in a lot of foreign
Protestants and gave them places in the English
Church ; he brought in foreign troops to be his body-

Lady Jane Grey 125

guard, bullied the Princess Mary (who was the natural
head of the Catholic party), thrust all the leading
Catholics into prison, and tossed the remaining Church
lands to his fellow nobles.

But Edward, who had always been very delicate, began Edward
early in 1553 to draw near his end. Mary's succession ^ very
was sure, and, though no one knew exactly what line
she would take in religious matters, it was certain that
she would stop the violent progress of the Reformation,
and quite certain that she would kill Northumberland.
So the Duke persuaded the dying boy-king, now Hisdeath,
sixteen, to make a will, passing over both his sisters, J,))3'
and leaving the crown to his cousin, Lady Jane Grey, Jane
heiress of the Suffolk line and recently married to one of Cjrcy-
Northumberland's sons. When Edward died in July,

*> 9

Jane was actually proclaimed Queen in London.

But not a cheer was raised bv the crowd, and the whole

%l 9

nation rose as one man for the injured Princess Mary.
Within nine days Jane was a prisoner in the Tower, where
a few months afterwards she was executed, and Mary
rode into London with her sister Elizabeth at her side.

Mary's reign of five years and four months is the Mary T,
greatest tragedy in our history. She was a good woman, ^ " p
passionately attached to the Catholic faith and to the character
memory of her mother. She was learned, clever and of
iofty courage. But she wTas a Spaniard at heart and never
an Englishwoman. Like a Spaniard she was vindictive,
and, unfortunately, she had deep wrongs to avenge.

Yet, if Protestantism were to triumph in the long The Re-
run, something of the fearful cruelty she was going to
inflict upon it was necessary ; for moderate men had
hitherto mainly seen it as the religion of a gang of selfish
nobles seeking to divide all the riches of England among

126

Mary I

themselves. Nine-tenths of England preferred anything
— almost the Pope — to Northumberland and his land-
grabbing crew. At the least, they wanted a return to
the state of things at the end of Henry's reign. 6 No
foreigners/ was the cry, 6 England and English Church
for the English/

But Mary cared little for her countrymen, cared only
for her Church ; she was determined to restore the state
of things which had existed at the beginning, not at the
end, of her fathers reign ; to restore the Pope and all
his works, and to do this by making the closest alliance
with the Emperor Charles and his son Philip, whom she
determined, against all good advice, to marry. In six
months she had terrified her people ; in two years she
had completely lost their hearts ; in six years she had
wrecked for ever the Catholic faith in the minds of
intelligent Englishmen.

She hurled all the leaders of the Reformed Church
into prison at once, and set about re-establishing the
Catholic services everywhere. The greedy nobles, one
and all, now professed themselves to be good Catholics,
and them she dared not touch. The one thing they
feared was to lose their new grants of the abbey lands.
They knew the Queen was bent upon restoring the
monasteries, and the laws for burning heretics, which
had been abolished in the reign of Edward VI ; but she
was not able to persuade her Parliaments to do the
latter until the end of 1554, and the lands she was never
able to touch at all. But Reginald Pole, long an exile
and now a Cardinal, came over as c Legate ' of the Pope,
and in the Popes name absolved England from the
guilt of heresy. Mary had already been married to
Prince Philip of Spain.

The Protestant Martyrs 127

The burnings of the Protestant martyrs began early in The Pro-
1555, and, in less than three years, nearly three hundred ^st^nt

y 9 J 7 J martyrs,

persons were burned at the stake. The burnings were 1555-s.
nearly all in the south-eastern counties, which shows
us that Protestantism had got the strongest hold on
what were then the richest and most intelligent parts of
England ; the north and west long remained Catholic.
The four great Protestant Bishops, Cranmer, Ridley,
Latimer and Hooper, were among the victims ; but
three-fourths of these victims were persons in quite
humble life. The people of those days were well used
to look on at all sorts of cruel tortures at executions,
and were quite unfeeling on the subject ; but the high
courage with which these martyrs met their terrible
deaths made an impression that has never been for-
gotten. So it wjis the reign of ' Bloody Mary ', not that
of Edward VI, that was the true birthday of Protes-
tantism in England.

And no great Englishman approved of the burnings ; a * Span-
it was only the Spanish councillors and the Queen JfatrSd ol
herself who urged them on. It was felt to be 'a English-

TTK3I1 for

foreigners job', and the hatred for Spain and all its ^Sn.
works soon came to outweigh the old hatred for France.

This hatred became much more fierce when Philip Loss of
dragged England into one of his frequent wars with JjSj?^
France, and when the cunning Frenchmen seized the
opportunity to make a spring upon Calais (which we had
held since Edward III), and captured it. The loss of
Calais seemed an indelible shame. All the last two years
of Mary's reign, revolts were on the point of breaking out.
French ships full of English Protestant exiles prowled
in the Channel and harried Spanish and English trade.
No heir was born to the throne, though Mary, who was

128

Elizabeth

Death of

Mary,

1558.

Elizabeth,
1558-1603.

Her

character.

' Glori-
ana.'

Her dan-
ger and
that of
England.

Mary
Stuart,
Queen of
Scots.

slowly dying of dropsy, kept hoping for a baby. Philip
showed her no love and little civility. Her reign had
been a nightmare of terror, and it closed amid loss, ruin,
pestilence and famine.

The Princess Elizabeth, who then came to the throne
in November 1558, was a very different person to her
sister. Her life had been several times in great danger
during Mary's reign, and the Spanish councillors had
often urged Mary to put her to death. She was a woman
of the most strangely varied character ; extraordinarily
stingy and mean, extraordinarily brave and fierce (not
cruel) ; passionately fond of her country, and English
to the backbone ; so jealous that she could not bear
her courtiers to look at another woman ; so vain of her
beauty that even in old age she covered herself with
gorgeous dresses and ridiculous jewels ; by turns a scold,
a flirt, a cheat and a heroine. But, somehow or other,
she made her. people follow, obey and worship her, till
at last she became a sort of crowned spirit and guardian
angel of the whole nation, which felt that it had grown
to full manhood and power under her protecting care.
Men called her 1 Gloriana \

Her position and that of her people was, at her
accession, one of great danger. England was entirely
without allies, and, owing to the bad management of the
two last reigns, almost bankrupt. Catholic Europe and
many Catholics in England considered that the Queen
had no right to the throne, for they had never approved
of her father's marriage to Anne Boleyn. The true
Queen of England, they thought, was Mary Queen of
Scots. So thought that young and beautiful lady
herself, and, in Elizabeth's first year, Mary became
Queen of France as well. Indeed, the prospect of the

The Religious Settlement 129

union of France, Scotland and England in one hand
thoroughly frightened King Philip of Spain, and made
him for many years more friend than foe to Elizabeth.

He therefore in 1558 implored Elizabeth to keep The
England Catholic and to marry some decent Catholic settfe-US
Prince. But her sisters reign had killed Catholicism in ll}en} °^

„ Jiinglana.

the hearts of all the best and most vigorous of the
younger men in England ; she knew this, and so, though
she dreaded the extreme Protestants and loved the
gorgeous services of the old Church, she rightly decided
that she must reign as a Protestant Queen. Yet the A Protes-
difficulties of settling the new Church were enormous *, Queelu
she had to make bishops of men who had fled abroad to
escape death ; and many of the most eager Protestants
now objected to bishops altogether, while many more
disliked even the very moderate services of the Prayer
Book of 1552. Such men were the germ of the party
soon to be called ' Puritans and, in later days, 1 Dis-
senters ' or ' Nonconformists '. Moderation,) then, was
the Queens watchword ; to build up a Church which
should offend as few, and please as many as possible.
Her great adviser for forty years was the wise William William
Cecil, afterwards Lord Burghley, the most far-seeing
and moderate of men. And the Queen and Cecil and Burghley.
their Parliament had, in five years — say by 1563 — built
the Church upon such broad foundations that it has
remained, with few changes, our own 1 Church of
England 9 until this day. Laws were passed in Parlia-
ment making Elizabeth 6 Supreme Governor' of this The
Church, making the Prayer Book (very slightly altered Prayer
from the edition of 1552) the only lawful service book, Thok"
and publishing the present i Thirty-nine Articles 9 as the Thirty-
Confession of Faith. Year by year more and more Articles.

1134 I

Elizabeth

people rallied to this Church, and Parliament was
able to pass stronger and stronger laws against those
who refused to conform to it, whether Catholics or
Puritans.

Plots All her reign, but especially for the first twenty-eight

against years of it, the Queen was in constant danger of being
Queen's murdered by some extreme Catholic agent of the Pope.

Such men called her heretic', ' bastard', 4 usurper'
and other ugly names. There was plot after plot, and
the Catholics, perhaps not unnaturally, considered the
traitors who were executed for these plots to be martyrs,
not murderers. But, as each plot failed, the main
result was to drive all moderate Catholics into the
English Church ; for most of them, much as they had de-
plored the ' heresy ' of their Queen, were patriots at heart.
Stingi- Elizabeth hated war, partly because she had a shrewd
ofthe *^ea ^"ia^ England was hardly strong or rich enough to
Queen. engage in a great foreign war, but still more because
she simply couldn't bear to pay her soldiers and sailors.
In fact, she expected her subjects to fight her battles
for her by taking service with rebellious Scottish, French
or Spanish subjects, while she pretended to be at peace
She helps with the sovereigns of those countries. But she was
torrebel °^en °bliged to send small, and almost secret expedi-
but tions to help these rebels. Philip of Spain, for instance,
secretly. engage(j jn a ]ong an(j desperate attempt to suppress

Protestantism in the 6 Low Countries' (the modern
Belgium and Holland), and our Queen was constantly
sending aid to the Protestants there, though never
The openly till 1585, by which time the 4 Dutch Republic'
Dutch. jia(j )3een born there, and had become the most valuable
ally of England. It was the same story in France,
where a strong Protestant party, continually fed by

Rivalry with Mary Stuart 131

underhand help from England, kept up a civil war for
thirty years. All this weakened the two great Catholic
powers, and made Elizabeth stand out more and more
as the champion of European Protestantism.

On the whole, however, her reign is mainly occupied
with two long duels, that with Mary, Queen of Scots,
1560—87, and that with the King of Spain, which began
to be severe about 1570 and lasted till her death.

The beautiful Mary Stuart returned, a widowed The long
Queen, to Scotland in 1561 to find that Elizabeth had SthSLn
already helped the Scottish nobles to overthrow the Stuart.
French power and the Catholic Church at one blow.
The new Church that was then set up in Scotland was The Re-
called the i Presbyterian \ from its government by 'pres- fc1^^.011
byters' or elders instead of bishops, and was far more land,
violently Protestant than ours. This is important to The
remember because, to those English Puritans who English

' , Puritans.

wanted to abolish bishops and the Prayer Book in our
own Church, the example of Scotland was always
present. Mary was a clever woman, but quite without
principles, and far more reckless than her English rival.
She honestly believed herself to be rightful Queen of
England, but she found it hard work to keep her own
crown, and in six years she had lost it. For she was
always an object of suspicion to the Scottish nobles,
both as a Catholic and as a Frenchwoman at heart.
She married her cousin, Lord Darnlcy, in 1505, and
bore him a son, who afterwards, as James I, united the
two crowns of Britain. Then, in 1567, Mary allowed her
husband to be murdered and married his murderer, the
Earl of Bothwell. Scotland rose in wrath, deposed and -plight of
imprisoned her, crowned her baby son, and had him M^ry to
brought up as a Protestant king. A year later Mary

i 2

132

Elizabeth

Mary in
custody in
England ;
her plots.

Her trial
and death,
1587.

Spain will

avenge

her.

The

English

Navy,

and Eng-
lish mer-
chant-
ships.

escaped from prison and fled to England, demanding
aid from her rival Elizabeth.

That clever lady pretended to pity Mary, but kept
her safe, at first as a sort of guest, soon as a prisoner
for nineteen dreary years. No wonder that Mary soon
began to plot against Elizabeth's life, and to implore
the aid of every Catholic power in Europe. The one
insurrection of Elizabeth's reign, that of the North of
England in 1569, was got up in order to put Mary on
the throne. At last, in despair, Elizabeths wisest coun-
cillors implored her to bring Mary to trial ; and in 1587,
the Scottish Queen was tried, condemned and beheaded
in Fotheringay Castle.

This was an open challenge on the part of England
to Catholic Europe. Mary had made a will in which
she passed over her son, left Philip of Spain heir to
both her crowns and implored him to avenge her. He
was ready to do so, for he had long been tired of Eliza-
beth's secret aid to his rebels, and exasperated at the
failure of the plotters to kill the English Queen. So
he prepared to send against us a great fleet, known to
history as the ' Spanish Armada '.

Now Henry VII and Henry VIII had been the real
makers of the English navy, for they had been the first
kings to build big ships which could sail anywhere and
fight anybody. And Henry VIII had paid very special
attention to guns and gunnery. He had also been the
true father of English merchant shipping, and had en-
couraged his subjects to trade to distant parts of the
world. All merchant-ships in those days carried guns,
for they always had to be ready for a tussle with pirates.
So, though the Spanish fleet was perhaps twice as
numerous as the English Royal navy, the number of

English Sailors

1&3

fighting ships that England could put to sea far out-
numbered those that Spain could send into the Channel.
And our men were going to fight, not only for Queen
and faith, but for home and wives and children ; to
fight too on their own shores, every tide and shoal of
which was well known to them.

When Spain had discovered America and the Portu- Spanish
guese had found the way round the Cape of Good Hope p0™tu-C 1 '
to India, each tried to exclude all other nations from
the seas they had explored, from the lands they had
discovered, and from the trades they had opened up.
And a Pope had had the astounding insolence to divide
these seas, countries, and trades between the Spaniards
and Portuguese, giving the Western World to Spain,
the Eastern to Portugal. Englishmen, when they abo- English
lished the Pope, naturally laughed at this exclusion ; i^^ica!
they meant to take, and did take English goods to all
countries where they could find a market for them, and
this rough deep-sea game went on all through the reigns
of Edward and Mary. In the reign of Elizabeth it
became the game of Englishmen. You can imagine
some simple English sailor lad, who had perhaps never
done more than a few coasting voyages from one little
port of Devon to another, opening his eyes to the
wonders of the Tropics as he sails in Francis Drake's Drake's
great voyage in the Golden Hind, across the Atlantic, round°the
across the Equator, south and ever south till the Strait world,
of Magellan opens the door into the Pacific ; then north
again, picking up here and there some rich Spanish
merchant-ship as a prize ; then across through in-
numerable spice islands to the Indian Ocean, and so
round the Cape of Good Hope and home ; home to his
own wind-swept Channel and the dear cliffs by Ply-

134

Elizabeth

mouth. This was in 1580 — the first English Voyage
round the World, the third only of such voyages in
recorded history ; honour to Sir Francis Drake !

With Drake in the Tropics.

South and far south below the Line,

Our Admiral leads us on,
Above, undreamed-of planets shine —

The stars we knew are gone.
Around, our clustered seamen mark

The silent deep ablaze
With fires, through which the far-down shark

Shoots glimmering on his ways.

The sultry tropic breezes fail

That plagued us all day through ;
Like molten silver hangs our sail,

Our decks are dark with dew.
Now the rank moon commands the sky,

Ho ! Bid the watch beware
And rouse all sleeping men that lie

Unsheltered in her glare.

How long the time 'twixt bell and bell !

How still our lanthorns burn !
How strange our whispered words that tell

Of England and return !
Old towns, old streets, old friends, old loves,

We name them each to each,
While the lit face of Heaven removes

Them farther from our reach.

Now is the utmost ebb of night

When mind and body sink,
And loneliness and gathering fright

O'erwhelm us, if we think —
Yet, look, where in his room apart,

All windows opened wide,
Our Admiral thrusts away the chart

And comes to walk outside.

With Drake in the Tropics 135

Kindly, from man to man he goes,

With comfort, praise, or jest,
Quick to suspect our childish woes,

Our terror and unrest.
It is as though the sun should shine —

Our midnight fears are gone !
South and far south below the Line,

Our Admiral leads us on !

/flTTHE. TIME OFTHC rtKHADA '

ELIZABETH REVIEWS THE TROOPS AT TU-BVIC*

Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh, Grenville, Cavendish and
a hundred more of gallant English merchants and
sailors pushed their ships and their trade into every
corner of Spanish America ; and of course the Spaniards

136

Elizabeth

hanged many of them as pirates and burned others as
heretics. Remonstrances to the English Queen were of
little use, for she was often able to reply to Philip,
'Then why is your Majesty encouraging plots against
my life and helping my rebels in Ireland ? '
The Philip had, in fact, delayed his attack too long ; he

Armada, had no idea how strong England had grown in the thirty
1588. years of Elizabeths reign. And though he was now
King of Portugal as well as Spain, and master of all the
gold mines of America, he was as stingy as Elizabeth.
Even in this critical year 1588, his 6 Armada' was not
nearly big enough to win, and it was very badly equipped
as a fighting force ; his ships did not carry enough
gunpowder, and most of their provisions were rotten.
Still, the terror was great in many English hearts as the
Spaniards swept up Channel in the last half of July.
For one long hot week our light and swift sailing ships
hung round their flanks, knocking their spars to pieces
at long range, almost w ithout the loss of a single English
life or gun. The object of the Spaniards was to avoid
fighting until they came off the Dutch coast, for there
was a large Spanish army collected in the River Scheldt,
under the great General Parma, ready to be ferried
across to the mouth of the Thames. But before the
Spaniards reached the Straits of Dover their fleet had
been half crippled by the English guns ; and, when they
were off Calais, a lot of boats smeared with pitch and
full of gunpowder were set on fire and set adrift among
them. This so terrified the Spanish Admiral that he
put his whole fleet about and fled into the North Sea.
Then great gales arose and drove them northward and
ever northward. Many were wrecked, the remainder
lumbered round Scotland and southward again round

The Spanish Armada 137

Ireland ; perhaps half or one-third, and these mostly
mere hulks, arrived at length in the harbours of Spain ;
the winds and waves and rocks had finished what the
English guns had begun : —

Long, long in vain the waiting mothers kneel

In the white palaces of far Castile,

Weep, wide brown eyes that watch along the shore,

Your dark-haired lovers shall return no more ;

Only it may be, on the rising tide,

The shattered hull of one proud bark may glide,

To moor at even on a smooth bays breast,

Where the South mountains lean toward the West,

A wraith of battle with her broken spars,

Between the water's shimmer and the stars. 1

Our country, and, with her, the great cause of free- England
dom and Protestantism, were saved. Spain was now f^T^f^
known to be mainly a bugbear to frighten children, and saved.
England and Elizabeth ruled the waves.

The great Queen lived for fifteen years after her The last
victory, and her enemy, Philip, lived for ten. She never Ki^abeth
realized how complete that victory had been ; when her L589-1W3.
best councillors and her bravest sailors urged her to
follow it up and blow the Spanish once and for all out
of the seas, she utterly refused. She allowed occasional
raids on the Spanish coasts and colonies, and one of
these took the city and burned the great dockyard of
Cadiz ; but pay for a big war she would not ; though,
in a big war, swift victory was all but certain, and
would have produced a lasting peace. Her last years
were very lonely ; she had never married ; the great
men who had helped her to make England a first-rate
power, Burghley, Walsingham, Drake, Grenville, had

1 Sir James Rennell Rodd : Oxford Prize Poem, 1SS0, * Raleigh \

138

Elizabeth

died before her. The rising generation was all looking
towards her successor, and that could only be King
James of Scotland, whom she cordially hated, and whom
she knew to be incapable of continuing her work. The
Church of England, which she had nursed, was indeed
safe ; but the Puritan party within it was growing, and
was strong even in Parliament. All this foretold that
seventeenth-century England would have plenty of
troubles to face, though no such dangers from foreign
foes and religious strife as had threatened it during the
seventy years of Elizabeths life and the forty-five of
her reign. She died at Richmond in the seventieth
year of her age in 1603.

Greater, perhaps, than all the other glories of the
reign of Elizabeth is the glory that, in her early years,
was born at a little town

' in the heart of a sleepy Midland shire '
(Warwickshire) the greatest poet of all time, William
Shakespeare. Elizabeth used to boast that she was
' mere English ' ; Shakespeare, whose genius sought the
subjects of his plays in all countries and in all periods
of history, was at heart, and in his art, as mere English
as his Queen. His characters may wear the dresses,
and bear the names of ancient Romans, of Bohemians,
Danes or Moors, but their language and their thoughts
are those of the Englishmen of Shakespeare's own day.

' Together.'

When Horse and Rider each can trust the other every-
where,

It takes a fence and more than a fence to pound that
happy pair ;

For the one will do what the other demands, although

he is beaten and blown,
And when it is done, they can live through a run that

neither could face alone.

4 Together ' 139

When Crew and Captain understand each other to the
core,

It takes a gale and more than a gale to put their ship
ashore ;

For the one will do what the other commands, although

they are chilled to the bone,
And both together can live through weather that neither

could face alone.

When King and People understand each other past a
doubt, .

It takes a foe and more than a foe to knock that country
out ;

For the one will do what the other one asks as soon as

the need is known,
And hand in hand they can make a stand which neither

could make alone !

This wisdom had Elizabeth and all her subjects too,
For she was theirs and they were hers, as well the

Spaniard knew ;
For when his grim Armada came to conquer the Nation

and Throne,

Why, back to back they met an attack that neither
could face alone !

It is not wealth nor talk nor trade nor schools nor

even the Vote,
Will save your land when the enemy's hand is tightening

round your throat.
But a King and a People who thoroughly trust each

other in all that is done
Can sleep on their bed without any dread — for the

world will leave 'em alone !

CHAPTER VIII

THE EARLY STUARTS AND THE GREAT CIVIL

WAR, 1603-1660

James I, Henry VIII and Elizabeth had given England unity
hisclfa ' an^ patriotism. Would the next race of kings, the
racter. Stuarts, be able to maintain unity? That was the
question which every one was asking while King James I
was slowly riding from Scotland to London in 1603.
James, of whom you may read the character in Sir
Walter Scott's beautiful story, The Fortunes of Nigel,
Avas already thirty-five, ' an old king he said ; and he
had had a miserable time in Scotland between the tur-
bulent nobles and the Presbyterian ministers who were
always preaching at him. And he had been very poor.
He knew England to be rich, and thought he was
going to be a rich and great king. He was a firm and
very learned Protestant, a kindly man, though irritable
and conceited. He saw a great deal farther than most
of his subjects saw, but he never understood the temper
of the English people ; and above all he did not knowr,
as the Tudors had known, when he had ' come to the
place called Stop \ You might describe him as

The child of Mary Queen of Scots,

A shifty mother's shiftless son,
Bred up among intrigues and plots,

Learned in all things, wise in none !
Ungainly, babbling, wasteful, weak,

Shrewd, clever, cowardly, pedantic,
The sight of steel would blanch his cheek,

The smell of baccy drive him frantic.

Temper of England

141

He was the author of his line —

He wrote that witches should be burnt ;

He wrote that monarchs were divine,
And left a son who proved they weren't !

Now the temper of the English people was going to Temper of
be a very serious matter. They were fully ' grown up En£land-
and fully aware that they were grown up ; and they did
not want to be i in leading-strings ' any longer. Even
the great Elizabeth, in her last years, had galled this
proud temper a good deal She had scolded her Parlia-
ments and done high-handed things against the law.
But she had served and guided her people faithfully,
and they knew it and made allowances accordingly.

James I and his son Charles I never thought of Mistakes
themselves as ' servants ' of their people. They wanted S?^®
to rule as the Tudors had ruled, though the need for the kmgb.
guidance and the leading-strings had passed away. They
were not 'tyrants ' or cruel men or extortioners, but they
irritated the nation until they provoked rebellion and
civil war. And so they broke the unity of King and
People, which was hardly restored again before the reign
of Victoria the Great.

The main thing to remember about them is that they Their
quarrelled continually with their Parliaments, with the 2?^p!fL
House of Lords almost as much as with the House of liamente.
Commons ; and nearly all their quarrels were over
religion or money. The House of Commons took the
lead in the quarrels, because it was the most powerful
body of gentlemen in the country. The Tudors had
flattered and strengthened it enormously, and added
very largely to its numbers ; for they had been rather
afraid of the House of Lords. The Stuarts added more
than a hundred members to the House of Lords in the

NORTHERN Shetland
SCOTLAND islands^.
Half scale of main map

Orkney pgjt*
/stands M>

CAITHNESS

l Falmouth
TThe Lizard

Longitude West 2° of Greenwich

Meridian o° of Greenwich

. tmcry Walker &c

GREAT BRITAIN, TO ILLUSTRATE HISTORY FROM THE
NORMAN CONQUEST TO THE PRESENT DAY

Religious Quarrels 143

hope of getting its support against the Commons, but
without much success.

First then, for the quarrels about religion. England Religious
was growing more Puritan every day. Men saw that the Angers :
Church of Rome had 'set its house in order' since the from
Reformation, and so was regaining its ground every- again!
where. It was catching hold of kings and courtiers,
even in lands that had been soundly Protestant fifty
years before. Spain backed it up with sword and gun ;
and Spain, though the old men who had beaten the
Armada might laugh at her, still seemed to be a gigantic
power. James I was bent on keeping peace with Spain James's
and wished his son to marry a Spanish princess. This, [^gpam
said the Puritans, would simply bring back the Pope
and Popery to England. Once some wicked and hot- The 'Gun-
headed Catholics made a plot to blow up the King and pj^er
both Houses of Parliament with gunpowder (1605). I 1605.
think you have all heard of Guy Fawkes and the 'Fifth
of November', but perhaps, when we see his absurd
figure carried about in the streets, Ave are apt to forget
that, on that day in the year 1605, he was actually
found in a cellar under the Houses of Parliament,
watching a lot of barrels of gunpowder to which he was
going to set light the next morning when Parliament
should have met. The King and the Prince of Wales,
and all the Bishops, Lords and Commons would have met
a horrible death, and the friends of Fawkes would then
have seized the government on behalf of the Catholics.
No wonder Protestants hated and feared a religion in
whose name such things could be planned. The Puri- 1
tans also said that the English Church was getting too Puritans ;
much like the Catholic Church ; or becoming, as we Church '
should say now, too 1 High Church \ The bishops were church™

144

James I

too powerful, the services too splendid, even the
teaching was growing Catholic again. So these Puritans
began to cry out, first for a limit to the power of the
bishops, then for their abolition, and finally for the
abolition of the Prayer Book. But, when it came to
that cry, England was by no means united, and at last
was divided on the religious question, into two camps
of nearly equal strength, who were obliged to fight it
out in a bloody civil war.

On the second question, the quarrels about money,
wrhich we can call the ' civil ' as opposed to the religious
causes of quarrel, there was no real division of opinions.
No one of any importance in England wanted the King
to be able to take taxes at his pleasure, nor to keep
people in prison without bringing them to trial, nor to
make war or peace without consulting his Parliament.
The Tudors had done many of these things, but, on the
whole, with the approval of the whole nation and for its
good. The people they kept in prison without trial
were usually foreign spies or traitors, who were
threatening the very existence of England as a nation.
James and Charles, however, sent members of Parlia-
ment to prison for speeches made in Parliament against
the 6 tyranny' of the bishops, against taxes, against un-
patriotic alliances with Spain. They took, at the
English ports, Customs' duties on goods without consent
of Parliament. They did indeed maintain a fine navy,
and they certainly built splendid ships, but they did
nothing with them. Their sailors were itching to cut
Spanish and Popish throats far away in America, and
Portuguese throats far away in India ; but the fleet was
kept hanging about in the Channel, while the flag was
insulted by Frenchmen, by Spaniards, and even by our

Civil Quarrels

145

old friends, the Protestant Dutch. So at last men were
unwilling to serve in such a navy ; and had to be
'impressed', that is, compelled to serve. And when
King Charles, in 1635-6-7, asked for a tax called 1 Ship- 1 Ship-
money ', to maintain the Navy, men began to say 1 No ', $63?e5 1
6 not without consent of Parliament', and so on.

It was the same story with the Army, or rather with The
the old 'militia' of 6 every man armed in his county', 4 Militia*,
which did duty for an army. The Tudors had not been
very successful in their efforts to make this force a real
one. Men hated the service and shirked it when they
could; they talked nonsense about 'England not wanting
an army when she had got such a fine navy '. You
will often hear the same sort of nonsense talked
nowadays ; don't believe it ! King James, towards the
end of his reign, had a fine opportunity of showing that
England could bite by land as well as bv sea ; for The
a frightful war broke out in Germany between Catholics fears'

and Protestants, which was to last for thirty years ; and }} *T in
ii ii* t-» i i i ~x i i Germany,

all good Protestants in England and Scotland were ieis-48.
eager to go and help their brothers in Germany. But
James couldn't make his mind up : he talked big and
sent messengers flying about to the kings of Europe,
but act he would not ; and so nothing was done except
that a great many volunteers went, both from England
and Scotland, and learned soldiering to some purpose,
as James's son, King Charles I, was to find out one day.
Till that day there was no real army in England, although
Charles, when he came to the throne, tried to establish
a general right of 6 impressing ' soldiers, and quarrelled
with his Parliaments at once about it. Lastly, James
dismissed all his Parliaments in anger, and used rude
language in doing so. When he died in 1625, nearly Death ojE
all the seeds of the future civil war had been sowed. 1625.

1194 k

146

Charles I

Charles I, Charles I, the ' Martyr King', was a very different
his cha-' man from his father ; he was shy, proud, cold, ignorant
racter. Gf the world, obstinate and mistrustful. He did not
mean to lie, but he hardly ever told the whole truth ;
and so neither his enemies nor his friends could trust
him. James would have liked to be good friends with
his people, and was at bottom what we call 'a good
fellow', with a strong sense of fun. Charles never
made a joke in his life, and did not care twopence for
public opinion, or for being friends with any one except
his bishops. His wife, moreover, was a Catholic and a
Frenchwoman and cared nothing for England. Though
a firm Protestant, Charles was much more ' High
Church 9 than James, and wanted to give the bishops
more power. He did once interfere (1627) on behalf of
the French Protestants, who were (rather mildly) ill-
treated at that time by their kings, but he made a
His quar- complete mess of the task. That was at the beginning
threeVPar- °f reign> and> as in his first four years he quar-
^^nts, relied openly with his first three Parliaments, he could
hardly get money enough to help him to live and
govern England, and none to defend the honour of
Eleven England abroad. Then for eleven years, 1629-40, he
without called no Parliament at all. This was the longest interval
Parlia- without a Parliament since the reign of Henry III, and

jxiexifc

1629-40. to all Englishmen, whose tempers were now boiling over,

it seemed intolerable.
Pros- During this period Charles took the Customs' duties

English f a^ Por^s? though Parliament had never granted them
trade. to him, and they proved to be his main source of income,
for, of course, the long peace since 1605 had greatly
increased English trade, not only with all European
countries (especially Turkey, Russia, Portugal and

Quarrel with Scotland 147

Spain), but also, in spite of Spanish jealousy, with
Spanish America, the West and East Indies, and the
Colonies which were now beginning to be founded in
North America (as I will tell you later on at p. 166).
Our 'East India Company', which began to build for
us our Indian Empire of to-day, had been founded at
the end of Elizabeth's reign.

Besides the ' Customs ', there were lots of other little Charles's
sources of income, many of them quite against the law,
and altogether Charles had a revenue of about a million Scotland,

1(337

pounds a year, which certainly enabled him to live as
long as he could keep the peace. Perhaps he might
never have called a Parliament again if he had not
quarrelled about religion with his subjects in Scotland.
His Archbishop of Canterbury was William Laud, an
honourable but narrow-minded man, who set himself to
weed out the Puritan party in the Church of England, and
to make every one conform to the services of the Prayer
Book. All Puritan England was already growling deeply
at this, when it occurred to Laud to try to enforce the
same services and ceremonies on Presbyterian Scotland.
Some steps in this direction had been begun by King
James, but had met with very little success ; there were,
however, already some sort of restored bishops in
Scotland, though they had no power. Suddenly, in 1637,
Charles resolved to force upon Scotland a Prayer Book
like the English one, as a first step towards making the
Church quite uniform in the two kingdoms.

Scotland, poor, proud, and intensely patriotic, had Resis-
for long felt sore and neglected since its native kings ^n^e
had gone from Edinburgh to London. At this ' English ' Scots,
insult it simply rose and slammed the door in the faces
of the King and his Archbishop. A 6 Covenant ' was

148

Charles I

The signed in Edinburgh and almost all over Scotland, which
ant ^1638. bound all men by the most solemn oath to maintain the
Presbyterian Church and to root out bishops and all
their works ; the Covenanters flatly refused all com-
promise, and Charles, if he were to remain a king at all
in Scotland, would have to fight. It would be no easy
task ; for neither Edward I nor Henry VIII at the head
of a united England had been successful against the
Scots. And Charles and Laud were almost the only
people in England who did not think the Scots were
right to resist ! The Scots got together a much better
army than Charles could get, and faced him sturdily ;
The first the first ■ Bishops' War as the Puritans called it, was
Warl opS a dead failure. ' Call your Parliament, Sir/ was the

1639. ' only advice his councillors could give the King.

The Short Charles gave way, and, in April, 1640, called a Parlia-
ment1 merit which, as he dismissed it in a few days, had the
April- nickname of 'The Short Parliament \ For, instead of
May, 1640. gjvjng Ylixr cash to crush Scotland with, it began to pour
out a torrent of the grievances of the past eleven years,
nay, of the past thirty-seven years; grievances about
taxes, customs, ship-money ; about bishops, popery in
high places, judges who twisted the law to please the
The King;, and so forth. After one more effort at war with
'Bishops' Scotland in the summer, during which the Scots simply
War', walked into England as far as Durham and sat down
there, the King had to own himself beaten, and to call,
Meeting on November 3, 1640, a Parliament that was to be

of the

LongVar- anything but short. History knows it as 'The Long
NoT if' Parliament

1640. ' The leaders of this body were no revolutionists or

'radicals'. Nearly all were great lawyers or country
gentlemen of old families and rich estates ; Hampden,

The Long Parliament 149

Pym, Holies, Vane, Cromwell, Hyde, Falkland, were the
leaders in the Commons ; Essex, Warwick, Bedford,
Broke, and Saye in the Lords. The great merchants of
the City of London, which was already perhaps the
greatest place of trade in the world, were on the same
side.

No one had the least intention of upsetting the throne Inten-
of King Charles. But in civil matters all were agreed f^[|„#lta
in wishing to purify the Law Courts and to restore the
6 ancient constitution by which they meant the control
of Parliament over the Crown, as it had existed before
the Wars of the Roses. The ' strong government ' of the
Tudors, they said, had been necessary at the time ; it
was no longer necessary. The King of England ought
to be a 1 limited monarch ', not an ' absolute monarch
and Charles must be made to realize the fact.

So, in about nine months, the whole fabric of the Work of
civil government was thoroughly overhauled. The Jj? ;**rst

~ ~ J nine

King s one honourable and clever minister, the Earl of months.
Strafford, was sent to the Tower and at length beheaded.
Archbishop Laud was sent to the Tower. The judges
who had twisted the law to please the King were
removed, and provision was made against their twisting
it in the future. Several new law courts, which had
grown up in Tudor times, were taken away ; the power
of levying any taxes without full consent of Parliament
was taken away ; and it was decided that henceforward
Parliament should meet at least every three years.

All this was done with the most thundering applause A rift
ot the nation, from Tweed to Tamar, from Kent to nation
Cumberland ; for, as I have said, all men were agreed as to
the i civil ' causes of complaint against their King. But
it was another story when questions relating to religion

150 Charles I

The were touched. Only one half of England was Puritan

religious or wished to abolish bishops or Prayer Book. Three-
question. L J

fourths of the House of Lords and nearly half the House
of Commons were against making any such change ; and
this at once began to give the King ca party' in the
State. He meant to use that party not only to save
the Church, but also, if possible, to restore his own
' strong government ' in civil matters. So things stood
in the autumn of 1641 ; and two events then hurried on
the civil war, the King's visit to Scotland, and a rebellion
in Ireland.

The Our Parliament-men easily guessed that the King's

King's yjsi£ i0 Scotland was made in order to see whether, if

visit to 7

Scotland, he had to fight his Parliament, the Scots would help
August, i|]m- Yor he gave the Scots everything that they asked,
and showered honours on their leaders ; in fact, he
appealed to their old jealousy of England. Still he got
little or no promise of help there.
The To understand the other thing, the Irish Rebellion, we

R^bVon mus* £° back a l°nS way* N° English sovereign before
October, ' the Tudors had seriously tried to govern Ireland. The
State of kings had often made grants of Irish land to English-
Ireland, men, who had then gone over there and had, in a few
years, become wilder than the Irish themselves. There
was some shadow of English government in Leinster,
with a ' Lord Deputy ' as Governor, and a sort of Irish
Parliament ; but, in the fifteenth century, the English
territory had shrunk to a very narrow district round
Dublin called 1 the Pale Outside the Pale, it was all
broken heads and stolen cows, as it had been for a
Ireland thousand years. But Henry VIII had taken the task
Tudorsthe of g°vernment in hand, and had tried to turn the wild
Irish chiefs into decent English landowners, who should

State of Ireland 151

really come to Parliament, help the judges in keeping
order, and cultivate their lands properly. He had dis-
solved the Irish monasteries as he had dissolved the
English, and had given their lands to these chiefs. He
put down rebellious earls with a very strong hand, and
quite successfully. He had taken the title of ' King '
of Ireland. The ' Reformation ' had been started in
Ireland under Edward VI, but there had been little
Reformation for Mary to suppress, and no 'heretics'
were burned there. Certainly, until the middle of the
sixteenth century, Ireland had shown little affection for
Pope or Catholic faith. But rebellion in some shape Catholic
remained the one thing that Irish chiefs loved, and it E!~"
occurred to some of them, especially to one Shan O'Xeill,
early in the reign of Elizabeth, that a rebellion in the
name of religion would be a much more successful
affair than without that name : ' England is now
Protestant ; therefore let Ireland rise for the Pope,'
was Shan's idea. Philip of Spain saw a splendid chance
(for the Pope and himself) of injuring Elizabeth by
sending aid to Irish-Catholic rebellions ; and, from with
1570 at least, he continued to do so either secretly or !fSam
openly until his death. The idea 1 caught on ', as we
should say, with the whole Irish nation and every one
went about shouting 6 Pope aboo \ ' Spain aboo ', and
' O'Neill (or Desmond, or some other wild earl) aboo \
Thus England, when she tried to keep order, always
appeared to be ' persecuting ' Catholics in Ireland.
But Elizabeth could not face the frightful cost of Colonies
keeping order there until the last two years of her reign, ^tions '
when she went to work in earnest and with some success, p Ireland

in six-

Usually she had preferred to plant 'colonies' of English- teenth
men upon some Irish districts which had been confiscated centul*y-

152

Charles I

after a rebellion. So Minister was 'planted', 1583 ; so
Colony of Ulster was planted with Scottish landowners, trades-
men and artisans by James I. These last were mostly
Presbyterians, and made vigorous and successful
colonists. But, of course, the Irish landowners, who
had rebelled and been turned out, always hoped to

Ulster,
1607.

IRELAND

English Miles
o ip 20 40 6o
i — I — i i— J id

ft. Boyne
PALE
15th. Century

ublin

aterford

fernery Walker so

recover their land. And the rebellion of 1641 was
prompted either by this hope, or by the fear of fresh
confiscation.

^Catho11 But to the Puritans in the English Parliament it
lies, 1641. seemed to be simply a rebellion of the ' wicked Papists',
' probably got up by the King,' they said, ' certainly by
the Queen, in order to give excuse for raising an army

Cavaliers and Roundheads 153

to use against the English Parliament.' And, with this English
fear in their heads, the leaders of Parliament were now ment
driven to take steps far beyond any they had intended fright-
a year before. First they brought forward laws for the
utter abolition of bishops and all their works ; and then ^n-t-
laws to transfer the command of the army or militia Bill',
from the Crown to Parliament. berTi64i.

This last was revolution pure and simple. No king civil war
could agree to this, and so Charles began to set about 111 sisnt-
preparations for war. Large numbers of Members of
Parliament came to join him from both Houses ; but
those that remained at Westminster were of course all
the more determined to fight.

The words 'rebellion', ■ treason', 1 traitor' are very Cavaliers
ugly words ; and traitors in those days were put to a 5?^ ^
very ugly death. So, many moderate men, who had heads,
hated Charles's unlawful government, and applauded all
the work of this Parliament during its first nine months,
now threw in their lot with the Crown. So did many
men who cared nothing for bishops ; Charles was their
King, and his flag was flying in the field. There were
many men, too, who hated the long sermons and the
gloomy nature of the Puritans ; for the Puritans ob-
jected to country sports, maypoles, dancing, and to lots
of innocent amusements. These ' Cavaliers ' called the
Parliament men ' Roundheads ', ' crop-eared rogues ', and
so on ; they gave the King an excellent force of cavalry,
in which arm the Parliament was at first weak. The
Kings best foot-soldiers were mostly Cornishmen or
Welshmen, good fellows to fight, too.

But the Parliament had the richer districts of the
kingdom, the South and East ; London was in its grip ;
it had most of the fleet ; and much the fuller purse.

154

Charles I

It is a great mistake to imagine that the war was one
of gentlemen against merchants and traders. Nearly
half the country gentlemen of England were Puritans,
and at first all the leaders on both sides were drawn
from the upper classes ; later on there were one or two
instances, on each side, where men of lesser birth rose
to high commands in the armies.

The equipment of each force was much the same ;
the infantry carried either long clumsy muskets which
could shoot about 300 yards at extreme range, or
6 pikes ', which were straight two-edged knives fastened
on to long poles. Each side cast a few light field-guns,
which did little damage ; but later on the Parliament
cast some heavy siege-guns which really finished the
war. Each side had soldiers who had fought in the
German wars : Prince Rupert, Sir Jacob Astley, Sir
Ralph Hopton, for the King ; Lord Essex, Lord Man-
chester, Sir William Waller, Sir Thomas Fairfax, for the
Parliament. The King had perhaps this advantage :
when the war began no one had yet dreamed of deposing
him, much less of killing him. * Whatever we do, he
will still be the King and his sons after him/ was the
idea in the minds even of the stanchest of his enemies.
So at first Parliament was ' afraid of beating the King
too much But Charles had no need to be afraid of
beating his rebels too much.

Once battle was joined each side displayed the
greatest gallantry, chivalry and mercy. No war was
ever fought with so much bloodshed in battle and
so little cruelty after battle. Except where actual
fighting or a siege was going on, civil life was not inter-
rupted. Down to the end of 1643 the advantage was
on the whole with the King. Then both men and

Battle of Edgehill

money began to fail him, and an incomparable leader
came to the front for the Parliament in the person of
Oliver Cromwell, who was to finish the war and die, ten
years later, something very like King of Great Britain.

With what feelings the men in either army must have
looked upon each other before the first great battle !

Naked and grey the Cotswolds stand Before

Beneath the autumn sun, Edgehill

And the stubble fields on either hand October

Where Stour and Avon run, 1642.

There is no change in the patient land
That has bred us every one.

She should have passed in cloud and fire

And saved us from this sin
Of war — red Avar — 'twixt child and sire,

Household and kith and kin,
In the heart of a sleepy Midland shire,

With the harvest scarcely in.

But there is no change as we meet at last

On the brow-head or the plain,
And the raw astonished ranks stand fast

To slay or to be slain
By the men they knew in the kindly past

That shall never come again —

By the men they met at dance or chase,

In the tavern or the hall.
At the justice-bench and the market-place,

At the cudgel-play or brawl,
Of their own blood and speech and race,

Comrades or neighbours all !

More bitter than death this day must prove
Whichever way it go,

156

Charles I

For the brothers of the maids we love

Make ready to lay low
Their sisters' sweethearts, as we move
Against our dearest foe.

Thank Heaven ! At last the trumpets peal

Before our strength gives way.
For King or for the Commonweal

No matter which they say,
The first dry rattle of new-drawn steel

Changes the world to-day !

Progress The King very nearly got into London, after a fierce
war, 6 drawn battle at Edgehill in Warwickshire, in the autumn

1642- 3. Gf jg42 ; but the Londoners turned out in such force

for the defence of the city, and looked so grim, that
The King Charles dared not fight his way in. He fell back on

1643- 6°rd' Oxford, and fixed his head-quarters there ; it was an

excellent centre ; he meant to move one army up from
Yorkshire, another from Cornwall, and a third from
Oxford, and so to crush Parliament between three fires.
All 1643 he strove for this, and his generals wron vic-
JohnPym tories both in the north and west. But then John Pym,
Scots^6 ^e statesman who took the lead in Parliament,
help Par- called in the aid of the Scots. The Scots agreed to

hament.

come, but demanded that their ' Covenant ', to enforce
the Presbyterian Church on all three kingdoms, should
Battle of be the price of their coming. In 1644 they came and
Moor^°n helped to rout the King's best army at Marston Moor,
1644. near York.

Oliver The real victor in that battle was, however, Oliver
ro we . QpQjj^yg]^ a Huntingdonshire squire, forty-three years
of age, who had never seen a shot fired until he began
to raise the sturdv Puritan farmers of the Eastern
Counties for the Parliament. He trained them and led

r

The Parliamentary Army 157

them till they became the ' Ironsides the finest cavalry The
in the world. Look well at them, and think of them ; Ironsides-
for they are the direct forerunners of the cavalry regi-
ments of our present gallant little army. Cromwell
was no narrow-minded Puritan, and for forms of Church
government he cared not a straw. But he held that
God spoke to each individual mans soul and pointed
out his path for him. He thought that all forms were
just so many fetters on men's souls, and that all churches,
especially the Roman and English, had laid on such
fetters. And he had been a strong opponent of the
King in civil matters also. Moreover, he saw, as no one
else saw, that ' half-measures ' would never finish the
war. ' If I met the King in the field, I would pistol
him/ he said.

In 1645 a new Parliamentary army, better paid and The 'New
better armed and more in earnest, was raised under M°tlel

. . Army,

Fairfax and Cromwell, and it won, within three months, I64r>.
the great victory of Xaseby, which practically brought Battle of
the Royalist cause to an end. A few gallant High- y?fj? by'
landers under Montrose made a diversion for the King
in Scotland, but Montrose too was beaten before the
year was over. Charles had already called into England
all the soldiers whom he had sent to put down the Irish
rebels, and he tried to get the help of these same rebels
themselves. This, as you can imagine, did not make
his cause more popular with his English Protestant
subjects. He was in fact a very bad leader of a very
good cause. Early in 1646 the King fled to the Scottish The King
army and Oxford surrendered. The Scots, after trying *\iesJ°

l lit' Oft M

to induce him to take the oath to the Covenant, sold 1646, and

him for £400,000 to the English Parliament as a prisoner

and went back home. The Parliament spent the years luonent.

158

Charles I

Parlia-
ment per-
plexed,
1646-7-8.

Crom-
well's
army
quarrels
with Par
liament,
1647-8.

Battle of

Preston,

1648.

Trial and
death of
Charles I,
J anuary
30, 1649.

1647 and 1648 in trying to make some sort of treaty
with Charles so that the government of the country
might continue under a king; Charles argued each
point, and was ready to promise, now this, now that,
but never anything sincerely. All the time he was
trying to get help from France, or from Scotland or
from Ireland.

Meanwhile the Parliamentary leaders had to try to fulfil
their treaty with the Scots. They could abolish bishops,
sell all the lands of the Church of England, turn out all
the Royalist parsons, and forbid the use of the Prayer
Book ; but they found it almost impossible to estab-
lish a Presbyterian Church in England. In reality
few Englishmen wanted this. Even those who had
most wanted to pull down bishops began to see that
'ministers and elders' might try to force men's con-
sciences quite as much as bishops had done. No one
felt this more than Cromwell ; and what Cromwell
thought, his army, which had finished the war, thought
also. This army began to growl against its masters the
Parliament. It also began to growl for the punishment
of 6 Charles Stuart, that man of blood '. When Charles
did at last persuade the Scots, who were by this time
very cross with the Parliament, to come in again on his
behalf, this growl became an open cry ; the Army duly
went and smashed the Scots at Preston, and then came
back to London resolved on the King's death.

Cromwell hesitated long ; he was a merciful man,
and he saw what a terrible thing he had to do — to kill
a king ! But he believed that the Lord guided his
mind, and that there could be no peace while Charles
lived. Parliament was utterly horrified at this sugges-
tion, but it Mas at the mercy of the Army which it had

Death of Charles I 159

created. Cromwell turned out over a hundred of its
most moderate members and terrified the remainder.
A sham court of justice was established to try and to
condemn the King. Charles, of course, refused to
acknowledge that any court had any power to try him ;
and he met his death on January 30, 1649, with perfect
serenity and courage. The very men who did the deed
were terrified at what they were doing.

Charles was a martyr, a martyr for the English Was
Church and its government by bishops, a martyr for j^artyi^*
our beautiful and dear Prayer Book. But the fact that
he was a martyr did not make him a good king or a
good man.

Yet, though Charles had often overridden the law, What is
and, if he had got back to power, would have done so jjj ^ put
again, what had the Army and the dregs of the Long place 1
Parliament to put in his place ? They confiscated and
sold to new owners much of the land of those who had
fought for the King. They set up a sort of Republic The
which they called ' The Commonwealth with a Council J™?^?11"
of State, and a single House of Parliament, in fact the <>r Re-
6 Rump ' of the Long Parliament, as witty cavaliers pu lc'
called it. They abolished the House of Lords the day
after they had murdered the King. In reality they had
abolished Law, Order, and the old natural Constitution ;
and all their efforts for the next eleven years to put
anything artificial in its place were hopeless failures.
The one real fact left in England was the Army ; this The Rule
meant the Rule of the Sword, the worst of all conceivable gw^.d.
tyrannies, however good the men may be who wield
that Sword.

They were good men who wielded it. Cromwell was
a man of the most lofty character, and so were many of

160 The Commonwealth

Charles II
in exile
and in
Scotland.

Cromwell
in Ire-
land, 1649.

Battles of
Dunbar,
1650, and
Worces-
ter, 1651.

Cromwell
4 Lord
Protec-
tor' of
England,
Scotland,
and Ire-
land,
1653-8.

his associates. They were also great patriots and great
Englishmen. But nineteen-twentieths of Englishmen
hated the whole thing heart and soul, looked upon
Charles I's death as an abominable murder, and only
prayed for Charles II to come and avenge it.

That young man, now nineteen years old, had fled to
the Continent. The Scots invited him to Scotland,
made him take the Covenant (which he hated) and
prepared to fight for him. But Cromwell and his Iron-
sides, after going across and stamping out the Irish
rebellion with a great deal of cruelty, made short work
of one Scottish army at Dunbar in 1650, and of another,
which had invaded England, at Worcester in 1651.
The young King fought most gallantly at the latter
battle, and had a series of hair-breadth escapes before
he regained the Continent ; you have often heard,
perhaps, of how he spent a day in hiding in the upper
branches of a great oak-tree in Shropshire — -

While far below the Roundhead rode
And hummed a surly hymn.

That is why people wear oak leaves on May 29, and
why so many public-houses still bear the sign of the
4 Royal Oak '.

Yet, if civil war was over, there was no civil peace in
Britain ; and in 1653 Cromwell was obliged to turn out
the 'Rump' of the Long Parliament and to take on
himself the government of England, Scotland, and
Ireland as 1 Protector', a title which pleased his old
friends little more than it pleased his old enemies. He
made experiment after experiment in forms of govern-
ment ; tried sometimes with, and sometimes without,
some sort of sham Parliament ; once he even tried to
create a sort of sham House of Lords. But all these

Cromwell as Ruler 161

things were only thin disguises for the rule of the Sword
and the Army. He was much pressed to take the title His rale
of King and to restore the old Constitution, but from hated!™*1
this he shrank. Except to Papists and to the beaten
Church of England he was not intolerant ; he believed
in letting men's consciences be free, and he strove to
make people righteous and God-fearing. All that, how-
ever, was a dismal failure ; it only disgusted all moderate
people with the whole Puritan creed.

Yet, in Oliver's five years of rule, he accomplished His Par-
what the Stuarts had not done in forty-five. Not only |Jf Jj**1*
had he subdued Scotland and Ireland, but he even three
made them send thirty members apiece to a sort of mgdoms#
united Parliament in England. And far more than this ;
he made the name of England once more dreaded and
honoured abroad as it had not been since the death of
Elizabeth. He wrung from the Dutch a heavy payment His care
for some wrongs they had done our traders in the Far Navy!
East ; he won for us a share in that Far-Eastern trade.
He fell upon the Spaniards in the true style of Drake
and Raleigh ; he took their great plate fleet ; he tore
Jamaica from them ; he sent his ' Ironsides ' to France His vie-
to aid France against Spain ; they were the first great
English army seen abroad since the fifteenth century, Spain,
and where they fought they swept all before them. He
took up the great cause of Protestantism all over
Europe. When he died in 1658 England was again the Hisdeath,
first naval power and almost the first military power in 16oS*
the world.

But when his son Richard (' Lazv Dick ' or ' Tumble- Richard

Croni

down Dick ', as people called him) succeeded him as wen pro.

Protector, the whole unnatural arrangement crumbled

. . 1608-9.

away at once because it did not suit the spirit of the

1134 L

162

The Restoration

English people. There were eighteen months of anarchy ;
now some soldier, now the restored £ Rump ' held power.
At last, in January, 1660, General Monck, an old soldier
of Cromwell's, who had the command in Scotland, made
up his mind to restore the exiled King, Charles II.

And on his thirtieth birthday, the 29th of May, 1660,
that clever and unprincipled young gentleman rode into
London amid the t£ars and shouts of a people gone
mad with joy. The reign of the Sword was over, the
reign of the Law had begun. Unfortunately this reign
of the Sword left on men's minds an unreasonable hatred
and fear, not only of this Puritan army, but of all
armies ; and that hatred and fear has too often paralysed
the arm of England, and is not wholly dead to-day. It
has prevented men from seeing that to serve King and
country in the Army is the second best profession for
Englishmen of all classes ; to serve in the Navy, I sup-
pose we all admit, is the best. Charles II prudently kept
up a few of the regiments of Cromwell's old army, and
even increased it a little during his reign. But he had
often hard work to pay it, for his Parliaments were
always jealous of a power that they knew had been their
master once and might be so again.

CHAPTER IX

THE FALL OF THE STUARTS AND THE
REVOLUTION, 1660-1688

The lessons of the 6 Great Rebellion 9 were by no Charles
means thrown away upon Charles IL No king after gl; 1660"
1660 ever attempted to raise a penny without con- Again a
sent of Parliament. Once, but only once, at the end of England,
his reign, Charles let four years go by without calling
a Parliament. Once, but only for a moment, an unlaw-
ful court of justice was created by James II ; and there
were hardly any other attempts at 'strong government'
of the Tudor type. There were plenty of quarrels to
come between Kings and Parliaments, but these were
nearly always about religion or foreign wars.

As far as possible everything was restored, in Great The
Britain and Ireland, as it had existed just before the stored.
Civil War. The two Houses of Parliament, with all
their old power, were restored. The Church of England,
with Prayer Book and bishops, was restored as in 1640.
It had suffered quite as much as the Crown, or the
Cavaliers who had fought for the Crown. A certain
amount but by no means all of the land was restored
to its rightful owners. Almost all the Church livings The Dis-
had been given away to Presbyterians and other Dis- senters-
senters. During the Rebellion a whole crop of ' sects 9
had arisen, some of which, like the Congregationalists,
Baptists and Quakers, are still with us. In 1660 all
wished for nothing better than a peaceful life, and to
conduct their worship in their own way. No one could

L 2

Charles II

Parlia-
ment
passes
laws
against
Dissen-
ters,
1661-5.

The Re-
storation
in Scot-
land.

complain when the church livings were given back to
the Church of England ; but it was a great mistake of
Parliament and Church to prevent the Dissenters from
holding their public worship as they pleased. It was
a lasting misfortune for England that a series of laws
was passed in the reign of Charles II to shut out both
Catholics and Protestant Dissenters from all offices in
the State, and even from offices in town councils.
Catholics were excluded from Parliament, for the Great
Rebellion had left a hatred of Popery greater than that
which had existed before it. These intolerant laws,
though partly softened for Protestant Dissenters in
1690, and for Catholics also in the reign of George III,
were not abolished till 1828 and 1829. Of course, no
persons now suffered death for their religion (and it
was in Charles IFs reign that Queen Mary's laws for
burning heretics were finally wiped out), but many
Dissenters w ere imprisoned, among them John Bunyan,
author of the Pilgrim's Progress.

In Scotland a similar restoration took place of the old
Scottish Parliament, in which Lords and Commons had
always sat in one house ; of Church government by
bishops ; of lands which had been confiscated. The
extreme Covenanters refused to recognize these changes,
and before long broke out into open rebellion in the
south-west. Rebellion went on smouldering a good
deal until 1688 ; much cruelty was exercised, and
much more was wrongly believed to have been exercised,
in putting it down. Charles's English ministers would
have liked to govern Scotland from London and to
unite the two Parliaments, but the patriotic spirit of the
smaller country was as yet entirely against this.

King Charles II came back to find a new kind of Eng-

Character of Charles II 165

land, an England less high-minded, less romantic, more Character
6 modern and more commonplace than before the war. Jj Cnarle«
The country was again set upon peace, order and money-
getting. The King set a bad example in his private
life, but in his public life he was not by any means
a bad king. He was very clever, and had a keen eye
for the interests of trade, of the colonies and of the
Navy. The Cromwellians had bequeathed to him a
very fine Navy ; but too often he let it rot for want of
spending money on it. His sailors were badly paid and
badly cared for ; he let his contractors swindle him,
and he was too idle to look into small but important
matters himself. Also he was always shockingly in
want of money to spend upon pleasure, and, if Parlia-
ment would not give him enough, he was apt to ask the
King of France to pay him large sums, in return for
which he would promise to do something which that
king wanted — not always to the honour of England.
But, when he had got the money, Charles very seldom
kept his promises to King Louis.

France was now taking the place in the eves of English-
Englishmen which Spain had held in the period 15(50- cEroLlof
1640, the place, that is, of the national bugbear and France,
terror, whose vast army and vast wealth were to be
used to help the Pope and to spread the Catholic faith.
Englishmen wanted to fight King Louis, just as they
had wanted to fight King Philip in James Is days.
Charles II, however, saw that our real rivals were the and
Protestant Dutch, whose merchant-ships covered all ^iVi/the
seas, whose trading stations were all over the world. Dutch.
And, if you are to understand this, it is time that I told
you something about the grow th of our own Colonial
Empire.

166

Charles II

The idea The first idea of all voyages to distant countries had

x 1

been to get either gold and silver, or precious goods like

nies

beyond silk and spices, which could not be grown in Europe.

the seas •

Spain, Portugal, Holland and France had all been
ahead of us in the race of discovery ; but we were going
Sir Walter to beat them all in the long run. It was Sir Walter
Raleigh, in Elizabeth's reign, who first imagined a true
' colony'. He did not mean, as the Spaniards meant,
a sort of shop, in which Englishmen were to buy gold
or silk or spices ; but rather a 6 plantation ' of English-
men in some distant land who were to buy all their
goods, their iron tools, their woollen clothes, their linen
and their boots from England. This would, in the first
place, give an enormous lift to English manufactures,
and, in the second place, would create a piece of
' England-bey ond-the-sea ', a piece, in fact, of an English
Empire. Raleigh planned to plant such a colony in
Virginia, on the shore of North America ; it collapsed
for want of funds. But the idea lived on, and in
1606 it was taken up again by a group of London
merchants, who subscribed money and sent out colo-
nists. By the year 1620, Virginia was a flourishing
little state.

The In that year some sturdy Puritans, since called the

Facers in ' P^Sr^m Fathers', got leave to emigrate to North
America, America. They objected to being compelled to use the
Prayer Book service in England, and wanted to worship
God in their own fashion ; and they founded a little
state called ' Plymouth ' on the American coast. Other
colonies, some religious, some commercial in their
British origin, soon followed, and, by 1660, the whole eastern
America coast Gf North America was dotted with little English

in seven- § # °

teenth states ; but, between Virginia and the more sternly

century.

British America

16T

Puritan ' New England lay a little wedge, on the valley
of the River Hudson, which had been settled by the
Dutch. There was no gold in North America, and,
except tobacco, no rich natural crop ; but there was
a virgin soil of great fertility, vast forests full of valuable
timber, swarms of fur-bearing animals like beavers, and
splendid fisheries on the coasts. So these peoples
rapidly grew into rich and prosperous little states,
working, in a climate not unlike that of Europe, at the
same sort of work that their fathers had known across
the ocean.

But many of the colonics were full of Puritans and Temper
Protestant Dissenters, the very men who, in King Colonists.
Charles I's reign, had fought against the Crown. So
there was born, in all our colonists, a spirit of resistance
to government in general, and the quite foolish notion
that all government is oppressive. Such a spirit might
easily lead to rebellion. The colonists, however, knew
well that all round them were Frenchmen, Dutchmen
and Spaniards, casting greedy eyes on their riches, and
that against these foes only the English fleet could
protect them. So some sort of pretence of loyalty to
their Mother Country was for many years almost a
necessity to them. The Mother Country usually left
them to themselves ; it never taxed them ; it sent them
Governors, who hoisted a British flag outside their Govern-
houses, and Hook the lead in Society ', but did little other {J^ ot
governing. Each colony set up a miniature House of Colonies.
Commons, or something like it, of its own, and made its
own laws on the English model. On one thing only
England insisted, that the colonists were to buy their
goods wholly from English merchants ; and if they
produced any goods which England wanted and could

168

Charles II

not grow herself (e.g. tobacco, rice, beaver-skins) they
were to send all such goods to England.
The two Charles II fought two great wars with the Dutch
Wars^ during his reign ; and great sailors came to the front,
1664 and though none as great as Robert Blake, who had been
Cromwell's admiral. The sailors and the Navy covered
themselves with glory, but, as I said above, the manage-
ment of the Service was shockingly bad, and it was no
thanks to King Charles that the Dutch did not win.

The Dutch in the Medway.

If war were won by feasting,

Or victory by song,
Or safety found in sleeping sound,

How England would be strong !
But honour and dominion

Are not maintained so,
They're only got by sword and shot,

And this the Dutchmen know !

The moneys that should feed us,

You spend on your delight,
How can you then have sailor-men

To aid you in your fight ?
Our fish and cheese are rotten,

Which makes the scurvy grow —
We cannot serve you if we starve,

And this the Dutchmen know !

Our ships in every harbour

Be neither whole nor sound,
And, when we seek to mend a leak,

No oakum can be found,
Or, if it is, the caulkers,

And carpenters also,
For lack of pay have gone away,

And this the Dutchmen knoiv I

War with the Dutch 169

Mere powder, guns, and bullets,

We scarce can get at all,
Their price was spent in merriment

And revel at Whitehall,
While we in tattered doublets

From ship to ship must row,
Beseeching friends for odds and ends —

And this the Dutchmen know/

No King will heed our warnings,

No Court will pay our claims —
Our King and Court for their disport

Do sell the very Thames !
For, now De Ruyter's topsails,

Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet —

And this the Dutchmen know !

There were some fearful drawn battles, both in the
North Sea and the Channel. Once the Dutch sailed
into the Thames and the Medway and burned a lot of
our ships at Chatham. But the main result of these
wars was that the Dutch gave up to us their colony in
North America, which was henceforth to be called New ^ew
York. In the same reign ' North and South Carolina 9 York-
were added to our American list of states ; they lie
south of Virginia, are hot and swampy, and produce
mainly rice and tobacco.

Besides these colonies we possessed several valuable Other
West Indian islands, notably Jamaica, which grew colomes-
sugar ; Ave had a whale-fishing and fur-trading station
in Hudson Bay, northwards from the French settle-
ments in Canada ; we had several little dots of land
protected by forts on the west coast of Africa, whence
we exported black slaves to our own and the Spanish
colonies ; and, in India, we had Bombay and Madras.

170

Charles II

The c East India Company ' had been founded to trade
with the far East (from which the Dutch had steadily
driven out the first European traders, the Portuguese),
as far back as the end of Elizabeths reign. Dutch,
Frenchmen and Englishmen scrambled against each
other to get permission, from the ' Great Moguls' and
other Eastern kings with magnificent names, to sell
and buy in those countries ; and, on the whole, during
the seventeenth century the English Company got the
best of the trade with Hindostan into its hands. So
you see the seeds of a great empire were already sown,
and the colonial trade made English merchants both
rich and very adventurous.
Parties in I wish I could say as much good for Charles IX's
ment? reign at home as abroad, but I cannot. And this is
mainly because in his reign we feel that England had
ceased to be united, and seemed to have little chance
of recovering its unity. The notion that 'all kings
are trying to oppress all peoples ' seems to have grown
up ; it was the outcome of the Civil War. So there are
now two 'parties' in Parliament and even in the
nation. There are the party of the King and his
ministers, and the party of those who are not his
ministers, but would like to be. These parties were
'Whig' then called 'Tories' and 'Whigs'; in our days they
'Tory \ call themselves ' Conservatives ' and ' Liberals ' (or
'Radicals'). Each was supposed to represent certain
principles of government ; the Tories were for Church
and Crown and gentlemen ; the Whigs for Dissenters,
for trade, and for all who would bully the King.
Their Tories were supposed to be against all changes in

pre-

tended l&ws or institutions ; the Whigs were supposed to
p.ri?" favour moderate and slow changes of law. Both pro-

ciples. ° 1

Government by Party 171

fessed to be utterly loyal to the Constitution, i. e. to
government by King, Lords, and Commons. But
neither was really true to its original principles. The
Whigs originally favoured a vast empire, and the
careful protection of British trade, by war if necessary,
especially by war with Catholic France ; whereas the
Tories were all for a French alliance and despised trade
and colonies. Nowadays things have reversed them-
selves ; and it is the Conservatives (or Tories) who want
to protect British trade, to keep a large army and navy
always ready for war, and to win the love of our
brothers in the Colonies. Each party has constantly
taken a different view of what the exact needs of
Britain are, and each has exaggerated its own view,
out of rivalry with the other party.

And this has been unfortunate ; for it has too often Govem-
made the leaders of each party tell lies to the people "party \
of Great Britain, in order to get their friends elected to
Parliament, and themselves to office as the King's
ministers. For you will see, if you reflect, that, when
every law and every grant of money has to be passed by
both Houses of Parliament, it would be of no use to
a king to have Whig ministers if there was a Tory
majority in the House of Commons ; a king who
wanted to govern well and without quarrels must take
ministers from the party which, for the time, has the
upper hand in the House of Commons. In those days
the House of Commons was chosen by a very small
body of electors ; now it is chosen by almost all the
grown-up men in Great Britain. But the principle was
the same then as now ; a king who, perhaps, wanted to
make a ' Whig ' war or carry a 6 Whig ' law might sud-
denly find himself, after the election of a new Parlia-

172

Charles II

ment, face to face with a c Tory ' House of Commons,
and so he would have to dismiss his Whig ministers,
take Tory ministers, and drop his 'Whig' war or his
4 Whig ' law. No doubt it has made kings govern
according to what was supposed to be the wish of their
people for the time being ; but, in the first place, a
people as a whole seldom wishes the same thing for
many years on end, and does not by any means always
wish what is best for the country ; in the second place,
the system leads to friction and quarrel between parties,
and so to waste of power and lack of union in the nation.

All this was only beginning in Charles IFs reign, but
it was beginning, and it was going to go on and get
worse. It has gone on and got worse every day until
now. In Charles IFs time Parliament was constantly
the scene of fierce party disputes, mainly upon religion.
Charles had no lawful sons, and his heir was his
brother James, who after the death of his first wife
had become a Catholic and married an Italian Catholic
lady ; Charles himself was accused of favouring Catho-
lics, even of being secretly a Catholic. Wild stories
were started and believed of 'Popish plots' to kill
Charles and set up James. (Charles, who was perhaps
the most genuinely humorous of all our kings, said to
his brother, 6 Dear James, no one would be such a fool
as to kill me in order to make you king '.) The Whigs
got up a plan to shut out James from the succession
and to set up a bastard son of Charles in his place ; in
1680, 1681, it looked almost like a civil war between
Tories and Whigs. But all moderate men dreaded this,
and the King played his game so cleverly that, when he
died in 1685, his brother James succeeded him without
trouble. Charles had taken sharp vengeance on some

Character of James II 173

of the Whig plotters, and their families did not forget
the fact.

James II, however, was not merely the Catholic king James II,
of a strongly Protestant people ; he was also the most cyJm
obstinate man in England. If not, like Edward II, racter.
a crowned ass, he was at least a crowned mule. In
three years he had wrecked his own throne, and very
nearly pulled down the ancient monarchy of England
on the top of himself. His Parliament was quite loyal
and quite prepared to shut its eyes to his Catholic faith, His
if he would not flaunt it in every one's face. But, from f^h°llc
the very first, he set himself not only to do this, but to
make the Catholics supreme in the State. He wished
to give them all posts in Army, Navy and Civil Service,
and even in the Church of England. He thought that He tries
by promising to abolish all laws against the Protestant ^e i§)jre
Dissenters he might get them to help him to abolish senters,

. 1687

the laws against the Catholics also. But the Dissenters,
who certainly had never loved the Church of England,
feared a Catholic king much more, and altogether
refused to listen to James ; they threw in their lot with
those very churchmen and bishops who had bullied
them. In Ireland, James appealed to the wildest pas-
sions of the Irish against the Protestant colonies of
Englishmen which had been planted thereby Elizabeth,
by James I and by Cromwell, and confirmed in
their lands by Charles II. To the one person who
could perhaps have helped him to put down England
by the sword, namely King Louis of France, this
crowned mule turned a deaf ear, and professed
that he wanted no such help. In short he listened
to nobody but a few Catholic priests in his own
household.

174

William III

Question,
of the
succes-
sion.

Birth of

Prince

James

Edward,

1688.

The in-
vitation
to the
Dutch
Prince of
Orange,
1688.

Character
of Wil-
liam of
Orange.

Until 1688 his heir had been his eldest daughter, the
good and beloved Princess Mary, who had been married in
1677 to her Dutch cousin, Prince William of Orange, who
was now the leader of Protestant (and much of Catholic)
Europe against the King of France. Most Englishmen
were content to wait till James should die ; then this
darling Protestant girl would be their queen. But in June,
1688, James had a son born to him, who would, of course,
be brought up as a Papist. The whole nation shivered
at the prospect ; its leaders, Whig and moderate Tory
alike, would wait no longer, and a secret message was
at once dispatched to Prince William, begging him to
come over to England, either to turn out King James
or to teach him by force (for nothing but force would
ever convince such a character) to govern better.

Prince William of Orange was the son of Charles Fs
daughter Mary. He was a frail little creature, nearly
always ill, with an enormous hook-nose and cold grey
eyes, which only lighted up in battle. His manners
were also cold and unkind ; but underneath all he had
a soul of fire. He cared for but one thing on earth,
to smash King Louis of France. He saw that rich
England had been, since Cromwell's time, too much the
ally of France, too much the enemy of Holland. He
thought she had played false to Protestantism. If he
came to England to deliver it from King James, he meant
afterwards to throw the whole weight and wealth of Eng-
land into the alliances which he was for ever knitting
together against his hated enemy, France. For English
'politics' and the English Constitution, for the squabble
of Whigs and Tories in the English Parliament, he
cared nothing at all. But he was the husband of the
heiress of England, and here was his chance of power.

The Revolution of 1688

175

Men went about saying that the child just born to Landing
King James was not his son at all, was no true Prince nameless,
of Wales, 'he had been smuggled into the Palace in
a warming-pan ' — and much other nonsense of that sort.
It suited William to believe this, or to pretend to
believe it. James was well warned of what was coming,
but he shut his ears, and so was quite unready to meet
William and his Dutch fleet, which had a lot of English
and Scottish soldiers and exiles on board it. William
landed in Devonshire and moved slowly towards London.
James had an army, many of whose regiments would
have fought faithfully for him, if he would only have
led them ; but he turned tail and fled to France ; and Flight of
just before Christmas, 1688, William entered London. f(te8ies>

What was to be done? Was James still king? Had who is to
Mary become queen ? Who was to call a Parliament ? be kmg •
(only a king can do this, and it seemed as if there was
no king). William, however, called a ' Convention '
(which was a Parliament in all but name), and, after
some debate, this body decided that James was no
longer king, but that William and Mary were joint William
King and Queen of England and Ireland. A Scottish §aryJI
Convention declared the same thing for Scotland. A 1689.
document was drawn up called the 1 Bill of Rights The Bill
which is a sort of second edition of Magna Charta. It 1689.* ^
fully expresses the idea that the Sovereign of England
is a 6 limited monarch' and that there are a great many
things he may not do.

This 6 Revolution of 1688' was mainly the work of the The Re-
Whigs, and William has often been called the ' Whig of loss-l).
Deliverer \ Revolutions are bad things, but it is diffi-
cult to see how this one could have been avoided.
James was a real tyrant, almost as impossible a ruler

176

William III

for Englishmen as John or 6 Bloody ' Mary I had been ;
and, since Mary II refused to reign without her hus-
band, and the baby Prince of Wales had fled with his
father, the question was perhaps settled in the only
satisfactory manner. But England was by no means
united by the settlement ; William was a foreigner and
a foreigner he remained till his death.

CHAPTER X

WILLIAM III TO GEORGE II, 1688-1760 ; THE

GROWTH OF EMPIRE

'Broavn Bess/

Id the days of lace-ruffles, perukes and brocade

Brown Bess was a partner whom none could despise —

An out-spoken, flinty-lipped, brazen-faced jade,
With a habit of looking men straight in the eyes —

At Blenheim and Ramillies fops would confess

They were pierced to the heart by the charms of Brown
Bess.

Though her sight was not long and her weight was not
small,

Yet her actions were winning, her language was clear ;
And everyone bowed as she opened the ball

On the arm of some high-gaitered, grim grenadier.
Half Europe admitted the striking success
Of the dances and routs that were given by Brown Bess.

When ruffles were turned into stiff leather stocks
And people wore pigtails instead of perukes

Brown Bess never altered her iron-grey locks,

She knew she was valued for more than her looks.

6 Oh, powder and patches was always my dress,

And I think I am killing enough/ said Brown Bess.

So she followed her red-coats, whatever they did,
From the heights of Quebec to the plains of Assaye,

From Gibraltar to Acre, Cape Town and Madrid,
And nothing about her was changed on the way ;

(But most of the Empire which now we possess

Was won through those years by old-fashioned Brown
Bess.)

1134 M

178

William III

Iii stubborn retreat or in stately advance,

From the Portugal coast to the cork-woods of Spain

She had puzzled some excellent Marshals of France
Till none of them wanted to meet her again :

But later, near Brussels, Napoleon, no less,

Arranged for a Waterloo ball with Brown Bess.

She had danced till the dawn of that terrible day —
She danced on till dusk of more terrible night,

And before her linked squares his battalions gave way
And her long fierce quadrilles put his lancers to flight.

And when his gilt carriage drove off in the press,

' I have danced my last dance for the world ! ' said Brown
Bess.

James II defeated in Ireland 179

If you go to Museums — there 's one in Whitehall —
Where old weapons are shown with their names writ
beneath,

You will find her, upstanding, her back to the wall,

As stiff as a ramrod, the flint in her teeth.
And if ever we English have reason to bless
Any arm save our mothers', that arm is Brown Bess !

The Bill of Rights had said that 6 to keep an Army in Reign of
time of peace was against Law '. Only the fact that ni^Sd
England was at war for very long periods during the Mary ir,
next hundred years saved the Army from being abolished ; 0f Wil-'
and at every interval of peace it was reduced far too Ham 111

t« i n alone,

much tor the safety of the country. In 1689 war with 1694-17 02.
France was certain, for, as I told you, William had
come to England mainly to induce England to help
Holland and other countries whom France was threaten-
ing. Also the French King at once took up the cause
of James.

James went to Ireland and called on the Catholic James
Irish to help him ; French troops and money were sent Catholic
after him. Ireland had now some real wrongs to jj^P J»
avenge, for Cromwell's conquest had been cruel, and 1LlUK'
many old Irish families had lost their lands, to make
room for English settlers ; these Catholics, therefore,
gave James a good army, with which, early in 1G89, he
advanced to try and subdue the most Protestant of the
Irish Provinces, Ulster. But he failed to take the city Siege of
of Londonderry, which held out against a most awful kondou-

n * derry,

siege for three months and more. It was not till a year 1689.
after this that William was able to muster enough
English and Dutch troops to begin the reconquest of Battle of
Ireland. He smashed James to pieces at the battle of the
the Boyne, and drove him once more into exile in 1690 ; ?690Ue'

m 2

180

William III

Cruel laws

against

Irish

Catholics,
1692-1710.

The laws

never

enforced.

Laws
against
Irish
trade.

Laws
against
Scottish
trade.

a year later the war ended with the surrender of
Limerick, which the Catholics had defended as bravely
as the Protestants had defended Londonderry. Ireland
was at last completely conquered.

William wanted to give, and promised to give, the
defeated Irish Catholics peace and protection ; but the
English Parliament intended that those who provoked
the war should pay the expenses of the war. A vast
number of estates were therefore again taken from the
Catholics and given to the Protestants, and a fresh set
of grievances began for Ireland. Harsh laws were also
passed in this and the next reign, both in the English and
Irish Parliaments, with the intention of stamping out the
Catholic religion altogether. They were hardly ever
put in force, for the whole Irish people, Catholic and
Protestant alike, hated them ; and men, after what they
had gone through, only wished to live at peace with
their neighbours. Harsh laws were also passed and had
been passed since 1660 in the English Parliament against
Irish trade ; for the jealous English merchants feared that
Irishmen would make woollen goods, or grow fat bacon,
beef or butter cheaper than England could do. These
laws were put in force ; and their result in the long
run was to make Ireland ripe for rebellion.

The same jealousy was displayed towards Scotland,
which was just beginning to have a few small manufac-
tures of its own, and which certainly grew excellent
and cheap beef and mutton. Then, too, there was a
large party which had clung to King James or was
ready to rise for him, especially in the wild Highlands,
north of the Forth and Clyde. The South and East of
Scotland had accepted the Revolution of 1688, and the
Presbyterian Church had again been established. The

Union with Scotland 181

risings for King James were put down, though not
without tough fighting. But, when Scotland asked to
be allowed a share in the trade with our colonies, the
English Parliament answered with a contemptuous
i no ' ; and the result was that Scotland growled and
growled more and more throughout the reign of William.
But in the next reign, after long and fierce debates, the The
old Scottish Parliament was induced to vote for a with**
union with the English (1707) ; and henceforward there Scotland,
was one united Parliament of Great Britain, and trade
was perfectly free between the two nations. Then
began the great commercial prosperity of Modern
Scotland. Within fifty years Glasgow had got an enor-
mous share of the trade with the British colonies and
India, and one of the most interesting tales of town
history is the story how the grave merchants of Glasgow
got together and set to work to deepen the river Clyde
so as to make it carry the trade which they knew would
come. The first Glasgow ship for tobacco sailed to
America ten years after the union, and began what is
still one of Glasgow 's greatest industries.

William III paid far too little attention to these
questions of Ireland and Scotland, but his excuse was
that he and his Dutch and German allies were engaged The war
in a desperate struggle to save Flanders and the line of iVth

. , . France,

the river Rhine from King Louis of France. With great 1689-97.
difficulty could he squeeze out of the English Parliament
men and money for these wars. None of the English
statesmen, Whigs or Tories, really liked the war, and
the Tories in particular began to dislike the Revolution
which they had helped to make. But wherever the
English regiments fought they covered themselves with
glory, especially at Steinkirk, 109:2, and Landen, 169:5,

182

William III

Jealousy
against
the army
in Eng-
land.

Death of
J ames II
in exile ;
a new war
with
France,
1702-13.

Question
of the suc-
cession
again.

though they were defeated in both battles. William
was a fierce and dogged fighter, but he was not a first-
rate general, and France still had the best of it when
a sort of truce was concluded in 1697. Parliament, in
which the Tories then had the upper hand, at once
reduced the army to 7,000 men.

This was most foolish, as every one knew that old
King Louis XIV was only preparing for a fresh war in
order to put his own grandson on the throne of Spain,
which fell vacant in 1700. The Austrians also claimed
the Spanish crown, and it was the plain duty of England
to help them. Many Englishmen, however, said, 'No,
let them fight it out. What does it matter to England ? '
'This is what comes of your foreign king,' and so on.
William, foreigner as he was, knew better. The growing
power of France threatened every nation in Europe.
The time had gone by when England could afford to
stand aside from the quarrels of her neighbours.

William might, however, have failed altogether to
convince Englishmen of this if Louis had not made one
great mistake. Old King James II died in 1701, and
Louis at once recognized his son (the same Prince of
Wales who was born in 1688) as 'James III'. This
was the same as dictating to Englishmen who should be
their King ; and the whole nation voted for war at
once. William would have led it to battle as bravely
as ever but for his death in 1702. His good wife, Mary,
had died childless seven years before, and her sister
Anne now became Queen. But Anne, too, was now
childless, and so, to find an heir of the old royal blood
who was also a Protestant, England would have to go
back a long way, in fact to the descendants of James I.
James I's daughter, Elizabeth, had married a German

Question of the Succession 183

prince, and that Elizabeth's youngest child, Sophia of
Hanover, a very old lady, was the best Protestant heir.
She had already a son and a grandson, who were one
day to be King George I and King George II. No one
liked the prospect of a petty German prince as our
King ; but most people thought anything was better
than a Papist, and unfortunately our lawful King,
James III, remained a Papist all his days. He could
have bought his throne at any moment by turning
Protestant, but he was far too honourable to do that.

Before we leave King William we must notice an Parlia-
important change which took place during his reign, j^esali-
a change which really transferred the sovereignty of powerful,
the country from King to Parliament. To previous Taxes,
kings Parliament had usually voted, at the beginning of
the reign, a certain sum of money to be paid eacli year
out of taxes, which sum, they thought, should be enough
to pay all the expenses of governing and defending the
country. It never was enough, and extra money had
always to be voted for wars. Now, however, William's
Parliament voted him only a small sum for his life —
enough for himself and his Court ' to live on ' ; but the
expenses of governing and defending the country, paying
the Army and Xavy and Civil Service, they only voted
from year to year. So since his time the kings have
always been obliged to call a Parliament every year
whether they wanted to or not— or else to leave army
and navy without pay.

Further, as William's wars cost a great deal of money, Loans and
and as Parliament shrank from laying on the heavy J^e

4/0 J tional

taxes which were necessary to pay for them, it allowed Debt,
the Crown to borrow money from any one who would
lend it at interest. The interest had to be paid yearly

184

Anne

till the loan was repaid. Few such loans ever wrere
repaid, and so a perpetual debt was created called the
1 National Debt ', which has now increased to an enor-
mous amount. But people are always glad to lend
money to the Crown, because they know they will get
the interest on it paid quite punctually. As long as
we pay the interest on this National Debt we are still
paying for some of King William's wars and for those
of all later sovereigns ; but we need not grumble, be-
cause, if these great wars had not been fought, there
would have been no British Colonies or Empire, and
probably no independent Great Britain ; our country
would have been a province of France. So let King
William sleep in peace.
Anne, Queen Anne's wars were going to be very successful

her""14 ' indeed, though they continued till the last year of her
character. ieign. She herself was almost the stupidest woman in
her dominions ; but she was a good and kindly soul,
devoted to the Church of England, and had generally
the sense to leave affairs of State to her ministers. She
called herself a Tory, and her ministers called themselves
Tories ; but they were going to fight a i Whig war \
By this I mean a war to maintain the Protestant kings
in England, and to increase the trade and Empire of
The Duke England. And so they really had to act as Whigs,
borough. The hero of that war was John Churchill, Duke of
Marlborough, the greatest soldier England ever pro-
duced. He was not only great in planning a campaign
and in fighting a battle, but also in his care for his
soldiers, their food, their clothing, their comfort and
their pay. Also he was very clever at keeping the
allies of Great Britain united. These allies — Dutch,
Austrians and Germans, were very difficult to manage ;

War of the Spanish Succession 185

for each thought mainly of their own interests, and

quarrelled with the others continually. But Marl- The War

borough thought of only one thing — how to beat the gpanish

French, and very handsomely did he beat them. At Succes-

Blenheim, 1704, Ramillies, 1706, Oudenarde, 1708, Mai- 1702-13.

plaquet, 1709, he won victories as complete as those of Battles of

Edward III and Henry V. And our redcoats were heim, &c.

foremost in all these battles and won immortal glory.

By 1710 we had swept the French out of Germany and

Flanders, and were well on the road to Paris. Our

navy had been equally successful ; we had beaten a The war

great French fleet off Malaga in Spain, and had taken 1? J

Gibraltar and the Isle of Minorca. In America our

colonists, with little aid from home, had begun to bite

away the frontier of the French colony of Canada. All

looked like ending in a Treaty of Peace of great glory

for Great Britain.

But in Great Britain itself things were not going so Parties in

well. i Politics ' had now become a sort of unpleasant 1>;ll ll<l
1 ^ i 1 nient,

cheating game, between a lot of great families of the

nobility, Whigs on one side, Tories on the other. Each

party strove to control the House of Commons by

getting its own friends elected to it, and thus to get

itself into office. The Tories, who were also the 4 High

Church ' men, hated, or pretended to hate, the war and

the Duke of Marlborough. They said, * It is a AVhig

war, a war for the interests of the merchants, many

of them Dissenters too, the brutes ! It is a war for

foreigners. It is all the fault of those who made that

wicked Revolution of 1688 and turned out our natural

King. Anne, of course, is a native, but who is to come

after her ? — a disgusting, fat German ! '

Moreover, the war was expensive, and, whatever

186

Anne

ministers may pretend, no one likes paying taxes. So
these men got the ear of the electors, and a Tory
Parliament came in determined to end the war at any
price. The Duke of Marlborough was accused of pro-
longing it for his own reasons, and being bribed by
foreigners to do so. Of course this was ridiculous
nonsense, but he was dismissed from the command, and
in 1713 peace with France was concluded at the Treaty
of Utrecht and Great Britain openly deserted her
allies.

Yet so great had been our victories that this Treaty
of Utrecht could not fail to be of great advantage to us.
It was, in the eyes of all Europe, the foundation of the
British Empire. It was like a notice-board : —

THERE IS A BRITISH EMPIRE :
FOREIGNERS
PLEASE TAKE NOTICE AND KEEP

te (; ■ off it. .;i iyi A : \ •' : ■ . i {

For we kept not only Gibraltar and Minorca, which
were the beginnings of the power of our fleet in the
Mediterranean, but also Nova Scotia and Newfound-
land, which had been the outworks of French Canada.
Also we secured certain definite rights to trade with the
Spanish colonies in South America. It was on trade
the Empire was founded, and by trade it must be main-
tained. But, remember, a great trade needs a great
defence by a great fleet and a great army. One gets
nothing for nothing in this world.

Yet old King Louis XIV had won his point ; his
grandson kept the throne of Spain, to prevent which we
had originally begun to fight. He did, indeed, give up

188

George I

the ' Low Countries ' (which in the Middle Ages we called
' Flanders ' and now call Belgium) to our Austrian ally ;
and the French and Spanish crowns were not united on
the same head, which was what we had most feared. But
the alliance of France and Spain remained, with hardly
an interruption, a serious danger for us until 1808 ; and
we had to fight four great wars against that alliance if
we were to remain an Empire at all.
The Sue- In Anne's last years, the question again came up —

Question w^10 was *° succee(^ ^ier • The Tories, who were in power,
in 1714. were almost inclined to say James III, in spite of his
being a Papist. But ' almost '*is not ' quite'; and
while the Tories talked the Whigs were ready to act,.
A German and, on Anne's death in 1714, George I became King.
George I, ^ Scottish rising on behalf of James in 1715 was put
1714-27. down with some difficulty ; and the result was, that
both English and Scottish Tories remained sore and
disloyal for many years, always with half an eye to the
6 King over the water \
The The Whigs, however, got their King, a dull, honest,

powerful! heavy fellow, and they allowed him no power whatever.

All the offices of State were divided among a few great
Whig families. George cared nothing for England,,
only for his native Hanover. The Churchmen growled,,
the country gentlemen growled ; but the Dissenters and
Small in- merchants rejoiced, and made haste to become very
the Ger°f Ylc^ Ordinary quiet persons agreed to accept King
man George, but without enthusiasm. Affection for King
kings. an(j Qrown entirely died away until it was revived by

the wonderful goodness and high spirit of the great
Queen Victoria.

There is practically nothing to record of the reign of
George I. The only important law passed was one

The < Septennial Act ' 189

-which said there shall be a new parliament every seven The J Sep-
jears, instead of every three years. Abroad there is J^F*
nothing interesting either. France, which had been 1716.
very hard hit by the war, only wanted peace. The new
King of Spain occasionally growled at our holding
Gibraltar, and twice tried to take it from us ; which
was unlucky for him, as we blew his fleet into the air.

George I died in 1727, and the first few years of the Georgeir,
reign of his son, George II, were almost as quiet as the ijg^?5
late reign had been. The new King was a shrewd, meter,
short, red- faced person, with great goggle-eyes. He
cared as little for England and as much for Hanover
as his father ; but he had fought bravely in Marl-
borough's wars when he was young, and was always
longing to fight somebody. He at least knew how to
swear in English, and he was rather too fond of
swearing. His Prime Minister, till 1742, was Sir Robert Sir
Walpole, who had ruled his father since 1721. This ^£j?Jje
man, though he shockingly neglected the army and the Prime
navy, managed money matters remarkably well ; and the 172^42''
result was that our trade increased enormously.

But the price of his neglect of the fighting services his neg-
had soon to be paid. France, when she had recovered „ of 1

r ' ^ army and

from Marlborough's wars, made a close alliance with navy.
Spain, and in 1737 Spain began to attack our trade in
America. Sorely against his will, Walpole had to de- War with
■clare war on Spain to defend that trade. France came rJJ5Jn' i

# 1 1 739, and

to Spain's assistance and the war then grew much more Fiance,

1740

serious. It was in fact a struggle for power and em-
pire both in America and India and lasted for eight
or nine years ; and, as our old Austrian and Dutch
allies were also attacked by France, we had to send
soldiers to Germany and Flanders as well, though we

190

George II

We hire
German
soldiers.

Party
squab-
bles.

Battles of
Dettin-
gen, 1743,
and Fon-
tenoy,
1745.

Prince
Charles
Edward
in Scot-
land.

Rising of
the Scot-
tish High-
landers
for the
exiled
Stuart
King,
1745.

could ill spare them, for it was quite possible that our
own island might be invaded. Unfortunately, we could
hire, Avith our abundant British guineas, Dutch and
German troops to fight our battles for us. I cannot
imagine a worse plan than this for any country, but it
remained a regular British habit down to our grand-
fathers' days ; and it still further increased the un-
willingness of our own people to serve in their own
army.

Walpole was dreadfully badgered in Parliament over
the badness of this plan, and over many other things ;
not so much by the few remaining Tory members as by
those Whigs who were not actually in office, but wanted
to get into office. And when they did come in, they
had no better plans to propose. Walpole resigned in
1742, and his successor, Carteret, a far greater man than
Walpole, was badgered almost worse, until he too re-
signed in 1744. Meanwhile King George himself had
led British troops to a great victory at Dettingen in
Germany, and his second son, the Duke of Cumberland,
led them to a defeat almost as glorious at Fontenoy in
Flanders, 1745. The French King had been seriously
thinking of an invasion of Britain on behalf of the
exiled King James III. But the French were justly
afraid of risking their ships against the British Navy ;
and so Prince Charles Edward, son of James III, resolved
to strike for himself even without French help. He
landed, with seven followers only, in the Western
Highlands of Scotland in the summer of 1745.

He called upon the well-known loyalty of the High-
landers to his family ; they answered him as only
Highlanders can. Without guns or cavalry, five or six
thousand of these men made themselves masters of all

The Rebellion of 1745

191

Scotland. They could march two miles for every one
that the heavily-laden English soldiers could march ; and
of course there were far too few of these regular sol-
diers in Great Britain. When the Highlanders met them,
they would fire one volley from their muskets, throw
them down, and charge with the ' claymore the terrible
Highland sword. The English soldiers, of whom, indeed,
the best regiments were abroad when the rising
began, seemed on this occasion to have forgotten all
Marlborough's lessons ; their generals were old, slow
men ; and the rank and file were terrified by the
ferocious Highland charges. So Charles was able, in
the winter of 1745, with never more than six thousand
men, to advance into England as far as Derby. The
few great Tory families in England, who were supposed
to favour the cause of King James III, ought now to
have come forward and helped his son ; but they did
nothing. There was, indeed, a real panic in London ;
and, if no one rose for King James, very few people
seemed anxious to fight for King George. If Charles
had gone on then, he might have taken London, but he
was persuaded to turn back from Derby, and, in the fol-
lowing spring, was defeated by Cumberland at Culloden Battle of
in Inverness-shire. That was the end of the Stuart cause ^lul}oelclK

1,40.

in Britain. Cumberland swept the Highlands with fire
and sword ; and though he failed to catch Prince
Charles, who, after five months' wandering, escaped to
France, he prevented any further outbreak. Fierce
vengeance was taken on the gentlemen who had risen,
and there were many cruel executions which might
well have been spared. m,

r Ihe war

The war with France had been fought in America of 1740-s

and India as well as in Ger many and Scotland. In the Jjjnerica.

192

George II

French
Canada.

The war
in India,
1740-8.

outlying parts of our Empire, there was hardly any
peace between the rival colonists and traders, French
and English, even though there might be peace in
Europe. You must remember how vast were the spaces,
how few the people, in the America of those days ; how
long, before the time of steamships and telegraphs, it
took to get troops or even orders across the Atlantic.
In bad weather two months was no uncommon time for
a voyage from Bristol to New York ; to Calcutta, six or
seven months was quite usual. The vast but empty
French colony of Canada had not more than one-sixth
of the population of the British colonies in North
America, then thirteen in number ; but it was much
better governed, fortified and equipped for war. Our
colonists were never united amongst themselves, and
did not want to be. They were none too loyal to the
Mother Country, while the French Canadians were
thoroughly loyal to France. That is why, between
1740 and 1758, the French were able to press our
people in America so hard. Their great object was to
occupy the valleys of the great rivers of Ohio and
Mississippi. These lay right behind our colonies ; and
if the French could have held them, the British colonists
would have been prevented from expanding westwards,
which was just what they were doing more and more
every year.

In India things were not quite so bad. France had
an ' East India Company ' like our own for trading with
the native states, and the two Companies were natural
rivals. Not far from our settlement of Madras lay the
French settlement of Pondicherry ; opposite to our
Calcutta lay the French Chandernagore. Even when
there was peace between France and England at home,

War in India

193

the rival Companies out there used to send their few
white soldiers to help some native prince, who happened
to be at war with another native prince. They also
took into their pay native Indians, whom we call
Sepoys. They drilled and armed them with European
weapons, and made them capital soldiers. An army of
two or three hundred French or English soldiers, with
perhaps two thousand sepoys, would beat any native
army you liked to name, even if it were fifty thousand
strong. In the war of 1740-8 the French did succeed in
taking Madras ; but, before that war was over, Major
Stringer Lawrence and Robert Clive turned the tide of Robert
victory again. Clive, who began life as a clerk, was the ^live.
real founder of our Indian Empire. When peace was
made in 1748 by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, Madras Treaty of
was restored to us. ;\1X ~liln

In Europe nothing was settled by that peace ; and in 1748.
India and America there was hardly peace at all. We may
cheerfully forget the dull and stupid Whig ministers who
ruled England from 1744 to 175G, but in the latter year
William Pitt took office. And in 1757 he became an William
all-powerful war minister. England was then in a very ^jjj11
bad way. i7">7-oi.

The wrar had just begun again, and the late ministers Bad state
had so obstinately refused to strengthen the army or JJ^tiy
navy, that the King was forced to hire six thousand
Germans to defend the coast of Kent against an expected
invasion ! France had taken Minorca from us, and
a very badly fitted out British fleet, under Admiral
Byng, had failed to rescue it. The fault was the
Ministers' who had neglected the Navy, but the nation
was angry Avith the Admiral, and, to save trouble to
the Ministry, Byng was tried and shot on his own ship.

1134 N

194

George II

Pitt saves

Great

Britain.

Our ally,

Frederick

of

Prussia,
1756-62.

The
4 Seven
Years'
War \
1756-63.

In

America.

Pitt changed all this very quickly. He called upon
the nation outside Parliament, upon Tory and Whig
alike ; and while he was War Minister, these evil party
names seemed to have lost their meaning. The spirit
of the nation, now united as it had never been since the
days of Elizabeth, rose to his call. He terrified the
quarrelsome House of Commons, until it voted him
whatever he asked for in the way of men, money and
ships ; he put the militia for home defence on a new
footing ; he doubled the regular army, and enrolled
whole regiments of those very Highlanders who, eleven
or twelve years before, had been fighting against King
George at home. He doubled the number of our ships
of war. As our old ally, Austria, had gone over to the
French, Pitt made a warm friend of the new German
power, the King of Prussia ; and, instead of borrowing
from Germany troops to defend Britain, he sent regiment
after regiment of British troops to help Prussia in
Germany against France and Austria.

The war that began in 1756 was called the 6 Seven
Years' War '. It was far more clearly a war for empire
than any earlier one. * I will win America for us in
Germany,' was what Pitt said ; and what he meant was
that France, if thoroughly beaten in Germany, would be
unable to spare troops to defend far-away Canada.
But, being a thorough man, he also set about winning
America in America itself. He even persuaded the
disloyal colonists to help us to fight their battles for
them, and he paid them to do so. His huge and
victorious fleet prevented the French from sending any
help to Canada. That colony did, indeed, defend itself
down to 1760 with true French gallantry. But when,
by an amazing piece of daring, our General Wolfe took

French driven from India 195

Quebec, the end was not far off. Three British armies, Winning
coming by different roads, gradually closed round the j^.1^ a'
Canadian capital of Montreal, and in 1760 all was over,
and North America was British from the Polar ice to
Cape Florida ; the one little French settlement on the
Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, had lost all importance.

In India there is a similar story of conquest to be The
told. There, the native princes had, on the whole, driven1
inclined to the French side. One of them — Surajah frojn
Dowlah — took Calcutta in 1756, and allowed a number 1757-00.
of English prisoners to be suffocated in a horrible
dungeon called the 'Black Hole'. Clive, with about
two thousand Sepoys and Englishmen, came up from
Madras to avenge this. lie retook Calcutta, and won
a victory, against odds of twenty-five to one, at Plassev
in 1757. That victory extended the power of the East
India Company far into Bengal. In the region of
Madras our success Mas equally great ; and in 1761 we
took Pondicherry, and swept the French out of all
India. All the native princes at once went over to
our side.

What was it that gave us, a nation of less than eight The
millions of men, these amazing successes over a nation j^£refc 0
of at least twenty millions, more naturally warlike, power,
quite as brave, and much cleverer than ourselves i It
was mainly one thing, sea power. The nation that
commands the sea by having the greatest number of
ships and the best-trained sailors, will always beat
its rivals in distant lands, simply because it commands
the roads leading to those lands. If you look back to
the beginnings of things you will see that it was Crom-
well, it was Elizabeth, nay, it was Henry VIII and
Henry VII, who, by their early and wise care for our

N 2

196

George III

Navy, won for us America and India. We might, and we
usually did, neglect our Navy in time of peace ; but in
time of war, it had got a mysterious habit of doubling
itself, and of discovering great fighting sailors. In this
war it had discovered three, Admiral Boscawen, who
Battles of beat one great French fleet at Lagos, and Admiral
and er°n Rodney, avIio played the same game in the West Indies.
Lagos, Perhaps the most daring of all was Sir Edward Hawke,
who, as Mr. Newbolt sings, 6 came swooping from the
West ' one wild November afternoon on to the French
fleet off the rocky coast of Quiberon, and fought a night
battle on a lee shore : —

Down upon the quicksands, roaring out of sight,
Fiercely beat the storm wind, darkly fell the night,
But they took the foe for pilot and the cannon's

glare for light,
When Hawke came swooping from the West !

Death of Meanwhile old King George II had died in 1760;
n6orgeI1, and grandson, George III, aged twenty-two, had
George become king. And now, almost too late, the Spaniards
1820. came to the help of their French cousins. Pitt wanted
to fly at them and smash them before they had time to
declare war on us ; but neither the new King nor the
Resigna- other ministers would agree to this ; and Pitt, in a fit
Pitt °1761. °f anger? resigned his office. Yet even when Spain did
War with declare war, at the opening of 1762, the spirit which
1762. ' Pitt had given to the fighting services carried all before
it. We mopped up the remaining French West Indian
Islands, and we took from the Spaniards their two
richest colonies, Havana in the Isle of Cuba, and
Manila in the far Eastern seas.

But when Pitt retired, the union of King, Ministers,

Accession of George III 197

Parliament and People, which had lasted for five out

of the seven years of war, was at an end. George III George

had his very valiant but obstinate mind set on only golvedto

one thing, to raise the power of the Crown, and to get put down

• • Wliicrs

free from the government of the great Whig families.

He meant to take as ministers whom he pleased. He

knew that he could not keep such ministers in office if

the House of Commons was always against them ; and

so he set himself to bribe the members of that House.

He would distribute offices, pensions and favours to

its members, until he had made a 6 Royal ' party, which

should oppose the 'Whig' party. This Royal party

would then vote with the ministers whom the King

would choose. It took George nearly ten years to do

this ; but he had a good deal of success in the end.

And the nation outside Parliament felt some sympathy Popu-

for him ; for every one knew how these great Whig °*

families had kept all the richest jobs of the kingdom in III ; his

their own hands. George was also very popular with c racfcer'

the middle classes and the country gentlemen. In fact,

he was a sort of Tory ; and this new Royal party

became a sort of new Tory party. George was at least

a thorough Briton, brave, homely, dogged, and virtuous

in his private life ; but he was in such a hurry to carry

out this political job, that he was quite ready to scuttle

out of his glorious war, and desert his allies just as

Anne's ministers had done in 1713.

Yet, like the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, the Treaty Peace of
of Paris of 1763 could not fail to bring solid advantages HS81
to Great Britain. Though we gave back to Spain her
rich colonies of Havana and Manila, and took from her
only the useless American swamp, called Florida, we
recovered Minorca. Though we gave back to France

198 George III

all her great and rich West Indian Islands, we retained
several of the smaller ones ; though we gave back to
her her trading-stations in India, she had to promise
never to fortify them again. And, finally, we kept our
greatest conquest of all, Canada.

CHAPTER XI

THE AMERICAN REBELLION AND THE GREAT
FRENCH WAR, 1760-1815 ; REIGN OF

GEORGE III

'Twas not while England's sword unsheathed

Put half a world to flight,
Nor while their new-built cities breathed

Secure behind her might ;
Not while she poured from Pole to Line

Treasure and ships and men —
These worshippers at Freedom's shrine

They did not quit her then !

Not till their foes were driven forth

By England o'er the main —
Not till the Frenchman from the North

Had gone, with shattered Spain ;
Not till the clean-swept ocean showed

No hostile flag unrolled,
Did they remember what they owed

To Freedom — and were bold !

Soon after the peace of 1763, we began to perceive The
one result of the conquest of Canada which few people
had expected. Our American colonies, having no American
French to fear any longer, wanted to be free from our 1775.
control altogether. They utterly refused to pay a
penny of the two hundred million pounds that the war
had cost us ; and they equally refused to maintain a
garrison of British soldiers. They intended to shake off
all our restrictions on their trade, and to buy and sell
in whatever market they could find. When our

200

George III

What the
English
Whigs
thought
of it.

War with

America,

1775-82.

The

1 United
States of
America
1776.

Parliament proposed in 1764 to make them pay a small
fraction of the cost of the late war, they called it
' oppression ', and prepared to rebel. 6 We are Whigs/
they said ; c Whigs always resist oppression. You
English Whigs did so in 1688.'

There were two results from this. In the first place
the great Whig families were already sore at King
George's attempts to take his ministers without consult-
ing them. And, when they saw the King and his
ministers set upon compelling the Americans to pay the
tax, they began to denounce the very things of which
they had formerly been the champions, namely, the
Empire, the Army and the Navy. America was right,
they said, to resist such ' oppression Even the great
William Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, said this. And so
the whole meanings of the words i Whig ' and 1 Tory '
were completely changed. The Whig became a person
who cared little for the Empire, and, occasionally, even
supported the enemies of his country, just as the Tory
of Anne's reign had done. And the Tories became, for
a season, the true patriots, as the Whigs of Anne's
reign had been.

The second result was that we had to fight our
Colonies, and that we failed to beat them. It was a
hopeless business from the first. The distance was too
great, the spaces of America were too vast for us to
hold by force, even if we had won in battle. The
quarrels in our Parliament were too fierce to allow of
success. We had no great minister at home, and no
great general in America. The colonists called a
Congress at Philadelphia ; declared themselves to be
independent ; and in 1776 took the name of the * United
States of America '. Blood had already been shed

War with America 201

when this happened. A real hero, patient, resourceful
and brave, called George Washington, commanded the
American army. We never sent enough troops ; we
had not, in fact, enough troops to send. Though we
often won battles, we suffered some very severe
disasters.

The Americans very soon sought French help, and They
France was delighted at such a chance of avenging her .
losses in the former war. The French fleet, though help, 177S.
small, had been much improved since that war, and
was able to draw away our ships from the coast of
America to all quarters of the world. We were just Naval
able to defend the rest of our Empire (except Minorca, p^JIL
which we now lost again) ; but not to beat our colonists 1778-83.
at the same time. Spain, and even our ally Holland,
soon joined France ; and for a few months, we had the
navies of all the world against us. So, when Lord
Cornwallis, with seven thousand men, was obliged to
surrender to a French and American force at Yorktown
in 1781, Ave determined to withdraw from America ;
after which, having our hands free, Ave finished the
naval Avar victoriously in other quarters of the world.
Rodney smashed a great French fleet in the West
Indies ; and Lord Heathfield, at Gibraltar, beat off the
siege of that rock, which had lasted for three years. By Peace of
a Treaty signed in 1783 Ave acknowledged the In- ^a-^"es
dependence of America, gave back Florida and Minorca 1783.
to Spain, and some small West Indian islands, as well
as Senegal in West Africa, to France. These were
serious losses ; yet France had been even harder hit by
the Avar than Ave had been. She had hoped, in return
for her help, to receive perpetual trading privileges Avith
America ; but the Americans showed no more gratitude

202

George III

to her than they had previously shown to us, and she
received none.

The snow lies thick on Valley Forge,

The ice on the Delaware,
But the poor dead soldiers of King George

They neither know nor care —

Not though the earliest primrose break

On the sunny side of the lane,
And scuffling rookeries awake

Their England's spring again.

They will not stir when the drifts are gone

Or the ice melts out of the bay,
And the men that served with Washington

Lie all as still as they.

They will not stir though the mayflower blows

In the moist dark woods of pine,
And every rock-strewn pasture shows

Mullein and columbine.

Each for his land, in a fair fight,

Encountered, strove, and died,
And the kindly earth that knows no spite

Covers them side by side.

She is too busy to think of war ;

She has all the world to make gay,
And, behold, the yearly flowers are

Where they were in our fathers day !

Golden-rod by the pasture wall

When the columbine is dead,
And sumach leaves that turn, in fall,

Red as the blood they shed.

All this time there were fierce quarrels in Parliament,
between Whigs and Tories, on many questions besides

Parliamentary Reform 203

the war. Every act of Government, good or bad, was ment,
torn to pieces and called 'infamous' by the Whigs, 'D
some of whom sought for popularity by writing in the
newspapers, and even by appealing to the passions
of the London mob. That mob more than once broke
loose and enjoyed some highly exciting riots, in suppress-
ing which King George showed great personal courage.
One of the cries raised at this time, both in and outside Cry for
Parliament, was for a better representation of the of House
people of Britain in the House of Commons. It was of Com-
really a very reasonable cry, for the existing system mons*
was absurd.

By that system each county sent two members to The
Parliament whatever its population. And in the j^roighs'
counties only actual oximers of land could vote at
elections. You might be enormously rich and have a
long lease of an enormous estate ; but unless you
owned land you had no vote. Then the boroughs,
which also sent two members each, were still the same
towns which had sent members to the Tudor Parliaments.
From many of these towns all trade, riches and impor-
tance had long departed, and some boroughs had hardly
any inhabitants at all ! Side by side with these were
great cities grown and growing up, which sent no
members to Parliament. Xow, if the Tories had been
wise, they would have taken up this question, and
made a proper and moderate ' reform ' of the House
of Commons. The Whigs, who called themselves
' champions of the people ', could hardly with decency
have opposed it. But when William Pitt the younger, William
son of the great Minister of the Seven Years' War, Pltt the

. younger.

took up the question in 1785, he could get very little
support from his own party. So this question fell into

204

George III

the hands of noisy agitators outside Parliament, who
cried out for a 6 Radical Reform and got the name of
i Radicals \

His first The ten years that followed the peace of 1783 were
r"83-i80i years °f Srea^ prosperity in Britain. The Americans
continued to trade with us as before, though, of course,
Our we could no longer compel them to do so. Our Indian
Indian Empire had been enormously increased since 1761 by

iiimpire. 1 . J

Clive and Warren Hastings, and by a long line of
heroic soldiers and statesmen. The East India Company
was now a sovereign power, and the greatest military
power in India. Parliament had begun to take notice
of it, not always favourable or wise notice, and passed
laws to help it to govern its territories. The Crown
now appointed a Governor-General, a council and
judges for British India. One of the favourite tricks of
the Whigs was to accuse the Company and its agents
of cruelty, extortion and so on. The first Governor-
General Warren Hastings was so accused, and though
he was acquitted, his trial dragged on for many years.
Discovery Still farther away the voyages of Captain Cook had
Ha^774-<t recentty revealed to Europe the huge continent of
Australia, the islands of New Zealand and numerous
other islands in the Pacific Ocean. Our first colonies
began to be planted in Australia in 1787.
The At home great changes were beginning which were

Revolu S°^US to turn Britain from a corn-growing and wool-
tion. growing country into the workshop of the world.

These changes have got the name of the ' Industrial
Revolution \ They took more than a century to work
out, and the result of them has been that we now buy
nearly all our food from distant lands, and buy it with
the goods which we make in our great cities, principally

The Industrial Revolution 205

iron, cotton and woollen goods. It is sometimes a little
difficult to arrange for an uninterrupted supply of food
for forty million people. Until about the middle of
the eighteenth century the south and east of England
had been the richest counties. Now the north and Iron and
west, South Wales and Southern Scotland quickly cua1,
began to supplant them, because in these parts iron
and coal are found close together. The invention of
numerous machines also began to save hand-labour, and
weaving and spinning, which were formerly done in
country cottages, were now done in great factories,
which could only exist in great towns. The most
important of all discoveries of this period is that of steam
the steam engine. For, by the force of steam, all engmes"
machines could be worked for all manufactures much
more cheaply and powerfully than by hand-labour or
by water-mills. England used steam in all her manu-
factures twenty years before any other nation, and
so no other nations could at first compete with her.
The sad result has been that the country districts have Increase
gradually been deserted and the towns have become oftowlls«
more important than the farming land. But the full
result was not generally realized until far into the nine-
teenth century. At first, the faster population increased Laclc of
in the towns, the greater was the demand for corn to fuod*
feed it. Very little corn could yet be brought from
abroad, because few countries had any corn to spare
before the vast spaces of America and C anada were
cultivated. So the price of corn began to go up and
up ; and, though wages went up too, they never went
up fast enough. When the harvest fell short, the poor The poor-
were often very badly oif for food, and had to have rate<
relief given them out of the Poor-rates. Poor-rates

George III

Riot

6.

The

Wesleyan
move-
ment,
1730-91.

Pitt's

wisdom

and

had existed since the reign of Elizabeth, but had not
increased much or been felt as a great burden until
this period ; now they began to increase enormously.
There were also riots in every year of bad harvest, and
many of these riots were directed against the new
machinery, which foolish men said ' took the bread out
of their mouths'. In that belief the rioters made a
point of breaking the machines. So, side by side with
the enormous increase of the country's wealth, there
was often found increase of misery and discontent
among the poor. Foolishly, but naturally, the poor
used to blame the Government and the laws for their
misery. But the condition of the lowest class of the
people, both in the old and the new towns, had long
been attracting the attention of serious people. In the
reigns of George I and George II, though many bishops
and clergy did their duty earnestly, there were many
who did not, and perhaps we may admit that the
Church of England had, as a whole, rather 'gone to
sleep '. It was this which gave such effect to the preach-
ing of the brothers John and Charles Wesley from
about 1730. They went into the poorest slums and the
most deserted parishes and preached, often in the open
air, the need of repentance and the duty of listening
to that message. The result was the foundation of the
6 Methodist' and Wesleyan communities, which gradually
grew into dissenting churches, separated, much against
the original intentions of their founder, from the
National Church. John Wesley lived to a great age
and continued to preach till the day of his death
in 1791.

It was during the long ministry of William Pitt the
younger, the son of the man who won Canada for u&

Pitt's Wisdom and Reforms 207

that these great changes began to bear their first fruit, reforms,
Pitt was Prime Minister from 1783 to 1801, and again 1'84~93-
from 1804 to 1806. For nine years he kept the peace,
and undertook an infinite number of valuable reforms
in every department of the State save one. He simpli-
fied taxes and the Customs' duties and the method of
collecting them ; he began to pay off the National Debt.
He tried to reform the House of Commons, to abolish
the cruel trade of carrying slaves from Africa to the
West Indies ; he tried to pacify Ireland and give it
perfect free trade with Britain ; and he would have
liked to abolish the laws which still shut out the
Catholics from Parliament. Every wise and moderate
change which took place during the nineteenth century
had already been conceived by this great and wise man.
But many of his proposals were upset or spoiled either
by the opposition of the Whigs, the stupidity of the
Tories, or the prejudices of King George. The one mis- His
take Pitt made was in refusing to set the army and navy ^glect of

. 0 V. t he army

on a proper footing to meet a future war. He seemed and navy,
to think that Europe was going to be at peace for ever ;
whereas the greatest Avar that had ever threatened
Great Britain was just going to burst upon her and
continue for twenty-two years. Then all Pitt's projects
for reform had to be thrown to the winds and the nation
had to harden itself to fight to the death.

This great war was caused by the 'French Revo- The
lution'. It Mas the old story of France desiring to ^vuhl-
dominate the Avorld ; and it l>egan in this way. The tion, 1789.
French people had a series of real grievances against
their clumsy, stupid, old-fashioned system of govern-
ment by an 6 absolute 9 king ; and they demanded a
parliamentary system and a ' limited ' monarchy like

208

George III

our own. But at the first touch the whole fabric of
old France fell to pieces. Kings, nobles, society itself
were hurled down ; all in the name of some imaginary
4 natural rights ' of everybody to have an equal share in
government. A Republic was set up ; King Louis XVI
was put to death. A new kind of ' Gospel' was
preached ; ' all men are equal ', ' all government is
tyranny, all religion is a sham ', 6 down with everything
and up with ourselves' ('ourselves' being the bloodthirsty
mobs of Paris and other great cities). This precious
Republic proceeded to offer its alliance to all the
peoples of Europe who wished to abolish their kings
and 6 recover their liberty '. It declared war on Austria
and Prussia, and began by invading Belgium and
threatening Holland, which had been our ally since 1688.

Then, at the opening of 1793, Pitt felt bound to inter-
fere. The nation was heartily at his back. Scenes of
the utmost horror and cruelty had taken place in
France, and the French people, once the most civilized
in Europe, seemed to have gone mad. There were
a few noisy politicians in Britain, both in and outside
Parliament, who sympathized with the French, and
cried out for 'Radical Reform' and a 'National Con-
vention' of the whole British people ; but they
were very few. The worst of them was the Whig
orator, Charles Fox, who had rejoiced over every
disaster of his country during the war against America.
A good deal of wild nonsense was also written in some
of the Whig newspapers. Daily newspapers began
early in the eighteenth century ; but they were still
expensive, and, as yet, few of the poorer classes could
read, so the newspapers used to be passed from hand
to hand, or read aloud in the public-house. On the

State of Ireland

209

whole, the voice of the newspapers was thoroughly
patriotic.

But if there were few sympathizers with France in Ireland,

• 1""8'^— 18(X)

Britain, there were many in Ireland. Ireland still had
real grievances, though during the last thirty years they
had steadily been removed. She had shown little grati-
tude for their removal, and many Irishmen had openly
sympathized with the American rebellion. In 1782 her
Parliament had been declared to be absolutely free from
the control of the British Parliament, and there was
therefore a real danger that Ireland might refuse to go
to war to help Great Britain. The Catholics were still Catholics
shut out from this Parliament ; but, excepting in Ulster, ST^fanST
nearly all the poorer Irishmen were Catholics. Pitt, as inlreland.
I told you, wanted to admit Catholics to both Parlia-
ments ; but it was not the time to make such a great
change, when Britain was in the middle of a dangerous
war, and when the mass of the Irish peasants, poor,
disloyal and ignorant, were quite ready to welcome
a French invasion of Ireland. From 1795 there was Civil war
almost a state of civil Avar between Irish Protestants ;ll\d „.

rebellion

and Catholics ; and, in 1798, the latter openly rebelled, in Ire-
England had very few troops to spare, and the rebellion j"^'
took nearly a year to put down. French invasion was
hourly expected, though only once a very few French
troops were able to land. When the rebellion was over, The
Pitt rightly decided that the best thing for both conn- ^ePwuL

tries was to abolish the Irish Parliament, and to make ments,

1 soo

one united Parliament for the two islands (1800). In
this united Parliament Pitt intended to allow the Catho-
lics to sit ; but King George foolishly and obstinately
refused to agree, and so Pitt had to resign the office of Resigna-
Prime Minister, which he had held for eighteen years. p?tt°i80i.

1134 o

George III

The war
abroad.

France
intends to
conquer
Europe.

English
com-
merce,
1793-1815.

The Naval

War

1793-7.

And now for the ' great war For Britain it would
necessarily be a sea war, and therefore a war for
empire, trade and colonies. For France, as far as she
could make it so, it would be a land war, since it was
Europe that France wanted to conquer, not sea or
colonies. At first, as I told you, she professed to be
conquering other states for their own good, ' to liberate
them from their tyrants/ and all that sort of nonsense.
But most nations, even those that really were badly
governed, soon found out that a French invasion was
much worse than any amount of bad government by
their own 6 tyrants'. So nation after nation rose and
fought against France, either one by one or in great
alliances of nations. All were beaten ; France was the
greatest land power in the wrorld, and her soldiers the
bravest, cleverest and fiercest fighters. All the nations
in the world appealed to England to help them with the
one thing which all knew she had got in heaps, money.
We actually paid Dutchmen, Prussians, Austrians,
Spaniards, Russians and even Turks to fight for their
own interests against France.

How could we afford to do this ? Simply because of
the power of our navy, which in a few years became so
great, that it was able to crush the commerce and to
take the colonies of any nation that would not fight
against France. Soon it was only in Britain that people
could buy the goods of the far East and the far West,
silk, coffee, tobacco, sugar, tea, spice. And at last only
in Britain could they buy manufactured articles at all.
Even the very Frenchmen who fought us had to buy the
clothes and shoes they wore from English merchants !

This control of the world's trade did not come to us
at once, and not without hard fighting. Pitt, as I told

The Naval War

211

you, had neglected the army and navy. Our admirals
were old, our generals were at first very stupid. We
sent some troops to help the Dutch, and they were very
badly beaten. Holland became a daughter-republic of
France, and Belgium became a French province. The
poor Dutch did not gain much by the exchange, for
the British Navy simply took away all their colonies,
notably Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope, just as it
was taking the French West Indian Islands. Nearer
home our fleet did not do so well. The French Republic
did not have so good a navy as the old French Monarchy
had had ; but its sailors made up in gallantry what they
lacked in skill and efficiency, and it was not until 1797
that we Avon a great naval battle in European waters.
The Spaniards had been forced into the French alliance, Battle of
and in that year Sir John Jervis and Captain Nelson ('ai)e Sl-

J 1 Vincent,

(soon to be Lord Nelson) utterly defeated a big French 17(J7.
and Spanish fleet at Cape St. Vincent on the Spanish
coast.

It was just at this time that the greatest soldier that Napoleon
ever lived came to lead the French — Napoleon Bona- v^"£
parte. He appeared first as a victorious general in
1796 ; then as ' First Consul' (that is, President) of the
French Republic, 1799; then in 1804 as 'Emperor of Becomes
the French'. By this time France had given up all !';^or
idea of delivering peoples from 1 tyrants ', and simply French,
meant to conquer all the world for her own benefit.
Napoleon at once saw that this was impossible as long
as Britain remained free and victorious at sea. To He means
invade Britain, or to destroy in some other way the EnSSid?
wealth and commerce of Britain, became his one desire.
But to invade Britain while our fleet watched outside
all French harbours, while it prevented French ships

o 2

George III

The
Volun-
teers,
1803-5.

Battles of
the Nile,
1798, and
Copen-
hagen,
1800.

Peace of
Amiens,

1802- 3.
War
again,

1803- 15.

The
critical
year, 1805.

from sailing out, and smashed them if they did, was not
so easy. The mere fear of invasion was enough to set
the hearts of all Britons beating. Volunteers flocked to
arms from every parish in our island ; and by 1804 we
had nearly half a million men in fighting trim in a popu-
lation of little over eleven millions. If we were to keep
the same proportion to-day, we ought to have nearly
three millions of men under arms. How many have
we got?

But in truth Napoleons chances of invading us were
not great. Nelson had broken his Mediterranean fleet
to splinters at the battle of the Nile, 1798, and had also
finished a Danish fleet (which had been got ready to
help France) at the battle of Copenhagen in 1800.
A few months of peace, 1802-3, followed the retire-
ment of Pitt from the Government. But the war began
again in 1803 ; Pitt came back in the next year, and
governed Britain until his death at the beginning of
1806. The years 1803-4-5 were the most dangerous.
Napoleon had got a great army at Boulogne (which is
almost within sight of the shore of Kent, not three
hours' sail, with a fair wind, from Folkestone), ready
to be rowed across the Channel in large, flat-bottomed
boats.

But what was the use of that without a French fleet
to protect the flat-bottoms ? If they had tried to get
across unprotected, a single British warship could have
pounded them into a red rice-pudding in a few minutes ;
and so our real task was to watch the French harbours
and prevent their ships of war getting out. The final
struggle came in 1805. The French admiral, Villeneuve,
managed to get out from Toulon ; drove off* the British
force which was watching the Spanish ports, and so

Battle of Trafalgar 213

freed the Spanish fleet. He then sailed across the Battle of
Atlantic and back again, in the hope of drawing all q™^^
British ships away from the Channel. After a long 1805.

chase Lord Nelson met him off the Spanish coast, and
won the battle of Trafalgar in October, 1805. It was
almost a dead calm all the morning as the English ships

214 George III

French
victories
on the
Con-
tinent,
1805-9.

Napoleon
attacks
Spain,
1808.

crept slowly towards the enemy — they must have looked
like moving thunder-clouds. Lord Nelson's famous
signal, 'England expects that every man will do his
duty / was spelled out in little flags from the mast of his
great ship the Victory. And every man did. Almosfrthe
whole French and Spanish fleets were there destroyed or
taken prisoners. No such victory had been wron at sea
since the Greeks beat the Persians at Salamis nearly five
hundred years before Christ. Nelson was killed in the
battle ; but the plan of invasion was over and Napoleon
never resumed it. The French Navy hardly recovered
from this defeat before our own days. You can see the
Victory still moored in Portsmouth harbour, and can
go into the little dark cabin in which Nelson died, happy
in spite of mortal pain, because he just lived long enough
to hear of England's triumph.

The remaining colonies of France and her allies were
gradually conquered during the next ten years. But at
first this seemed to help little towards freeing the conti-
nent of Europe, which, by 1807, France had subdued
right up to the Russian frontier. Prussia had been
beaten to pieces in 1806 ; Austria, which, on the whole,
had been the most steady of Napoleon's enemies, was
beaten for the third time in 1809, and was half inclined
to make an alliance with him ; but by that time Napo-
leon had run his head against something which wras
going to destroy him.

Much the worst governed, most ignorant, most back-
ward nation in Europe, was Spain. Napoleon thought
it would be easy to put one of his brothers on the throne
of Spain, and one of his generals on the throne of
Portugal. Spain was, besides, the oldest ally of France ;
but when Napoleon tried this plan in 1808, she became

The Peninsular War

215

at once his fiercest enemy. She did not want to be
' reformed ' or better governed ; she wanted to keep her
stupid, cruel Catholic kings and priests. Both Spain British
and Portugal at once cried out for British help ; and, as *e°tPto
the road by sea was in our hands, we began at once to Portugal,

1808

send help in money, and very soon in men. With the
men we sent a man. 1 In war ', said Napoleon himself,
' it is not so much men as a man that counts/ Sir Sir
Arthur Wellesley, one day to be known as the Duke of fveJies-
Wellington, was perhaps not so great a soldier as Marl- ley-
borough or as Napoleon. His previous experience of
war had been mostly in India, where, under his brother,
the Marquis Wellesley, who was Governor-General of
India, he had won, in 1803 and 1804, great victories
over enormous swarms of native cavalry called Mahrat-
tas. But he was the most patient and skilful leader we
had had since Marlborough, and he had complete confi-
dence in himself and in his power to beat the French.

He landed in Portugal in 1808, won a great battle at The
Vimeiro, and early in the next year had driven the ^JrWar'
French back into Spain. He then made Lisbon (the battle of
capital city of Portugal) his ' base of operations \ The igog^
British fleet was able continually to bring supplies,
money, food and men to Lisbon. Wellington fortified
the approach to the city very strongly, and was able to
repel an enormous French army, which came to attack
him there in 1810. He followed it up into Spain as it Welling-
retreated ; and year by year advanced farther into a^ronae
Spain, winning battle after battle. But each winter he M10-11-
fell back upon his base. The fierce patriotism of the
Spanish peasants, who killed every Frenchman they met,
helped us enormously, though in the battles their armies
were of little use to us, and their generals worse than

216

George III

Battle of
Vittoria,
1813.

Napoleon
attacks
Russia,
1812; his
defeat.

Europe
awake to
resist
France,
1813-14.

Lord
Castle-
reagh,
1812-15.

Napoleon
abdicates,
\814.

useless. At last in 1813 came a year in which Welling-
ton did not need to retreat into Portugal. He won the
great battle of Vittoria in June, and then drove the
French back in headlong flight over the Pyrenees.
Early in 1814 our men were fighting their way into that
French province which, five hundred years before, we
used to call 6 English Aquitaine

And meanwhile in 1812, at the other end of Europe,
Napoleon himself had suffered an even worse disaster.
He had invaded Russia, a country whose people were as
ignorant, as backward and as patriotic as the Spaniards.
The greatest French army that was ever put on foot had
starved and been frozen among the snows of Russia.
As its broken remnants retreated through Germany, the
Prussians, whom the French had cruelly ill-treated since
1806, jumped upon them, and called on all other Germans
to do the same. The Austrians joined in. England
poured money into the hands of all who would fight the
French. Since Pitts death until 1812 there had only
been one great British minister, George Canning ; but
he had resigned his office in 1809. Now in 1812 Lord
Castlereagh, a minister almost as great as Pitt, came to
the front, and it was his Government that really finished
the war. Napoleon could, indeed, collect a new army in
1813, but it was never so good as the one he had lost in
Russia ; and it suffered a fearful defeat at Leipzig.
After a most gallant defence of the French roads which
lead to Paris, Napoleon was compelled by his own
generals to resign the throne, and Louis XVIII, the heir
of the old French monarchy, was recalled to France as
king in 1814. Napoleon was allowed to retire to the little
Italian island of Elba, but he did not stay there long.

In order to arrange a general peace, the great

Battle of Waterloo 217

powers of Europe sent ambassadors to Vienna. But Congress
while they were doing this, in March, 1815, Napoleon isis1^11^
escaped from Elba, landed in France, and called on the ™tur? of

x 7 . Napoleon,

rrench people to follow him once more. Is early all March,
Frenchmen were tired of war ; but, like other brave 18I°*

• War of

fellows, they loved glory, and Napoleon's name spelt 1815.
glory for them. They forgot his tyranny and his folly,
and they proclaimed him Emperor yet again. Europe
was utterly taken by surprise, and nearly all its armies
had been dismissed. But the Prussians and English were
more ready for fighting than the Russians and Austrians,
and so within three months they were able to collect
over two hundred thousand men for the defence of
Belgium. Napoleon's new army was nearly three
hundred thousand strong ; but he only took about half
of it to attack Belgium early in the summer of 1815.

The Duke of Wellington and the Prussian general, Battles of
Marshal Blucher, were waiting for him in a long line to Bras and
the south of Brussels. On June 16th, Napoleon's left ^"yjG
wing fought a fearful drawn battle with Wellington isi5.
at Quatre Bras, and his right wing just managed to
beat Blucher at Ligny. On the 17th there was no
fighting ; but the Prussians had fallen back northwards,
and had lost their close touch with the English. So, Battle of
on the 18th, Wellington with 69,000 British, Hanoverians J^T}™'
and Brunswickers had to bear, for seven hours, the 1^15.
attacks of 75,000 Frenchmen at Waterloo. Wellington
knew that Blucher would come and help him as fast
as he could ; but the roads were heavy from rain, and
Blucher had been fearfully hard hit two days before.
But at last he came, though his men did not get into
action till about 4.30 p.m., and did not produce much
effect on the French for two hours more. We had then

218

George III

been defending our position since 11 a.m. But soon after
seven we began to advance, and the night closed with a
headlong flight of the French Emperor and his army on
the road to Paris.
Peace at This battle of Waterloo ended the Great War ; the
last, 1815. |ag£ war^ ^ ug j10p0^ we shall ever have to fight

against the French, who are now our best friends. Long
ago Pitt had said, £ England has saved herself by her
exertions, she will save Europe by her example.' In
1815 she had indeed done both.
The gains When the final treaty was made in that year, our
Britafn^t Sa^ns *n actual territory were small. We gave back the
the Peace, greater part of the colonies we had taken from France
and her allies, keeping only the West Indian island of
Tobago, the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, the
Dutch colonies of Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope,
and the little Dutch province of Guiana in South
America. In the Mediterranean, we kept the island of
Malta, but gave back Minorca to Spain. Our real
reward, then, came in the commerce of the world, which
during the war had passed wholly into our hands.

The French Wars.

The boats of Newhaven and Folkestone and Dover
To Dieppe and Boulogne and to Calais cross over ;
And in each of those runs there is not a square yard
Where the English and French haven't fought and fought
hard !

If the ships that were sunk could be floated once more,
They'd stretch like a raft from the shore to the shore,
And we'd see, as we crossed, every pattern and plan
Of ship that was built since sea-fighting began.

The French Wars 219

There'd be biremes and brigantines, cutters and sloops,
Cogs, carracks and galleons with gay gilded poops —
Hoys, caravels, ketches, corvettes and the rest,
As thick as regattas, from Ramsgate to Brest.

But the galleys of Caesar, the squadrons of Sluys,
And Nelson's crack frigates are hid from our eyes,
Where the high Seventy-fours of Napoleons days
Lie down with Deal luggers and French chasse-marees.

They'll answer no signal — they rest on the ooze
With their honey-combed guns and their skeleton
crews —

And racing above them, through sunshine or irale,
The Cross-Channel packets come in with the Mail

Then the poor sea-sick passengers, English and French,
Must open their trunks on the Custom-house bench,
While the officers rummage for smuggled cigars
And nobody thinks of our blood-thirsty wars !

CHAPTER XII

GEORGE III TO GEORGE V, 1815-1911

The last
ninety-
six years.

Progress
towards
Demo-
cracy.

Five

sovereigns
in these

The period of English History which remains for me
to tell you about will bring us down to our own days.
It is a much more difficult story to understand than
any that I have already told you. It is also much more
difficult to write about.

For people hold such diverse opinions about the
events of the present day and of the last hundred years.
These opinions are very often the result of their up-
bringing ; ' we have heard with our ears and our fathers
have told us.' Men are still alive who were born before
Waterloo was fought. As you get older you will form
opinions about these events for yourselves ; and so it is
desirable for me, in this last chapter, rather to state
what did take place than to try to guide your opinions.
And it will be easier to do this if you, my readers, will
allow me to treat the period as all one, rather than
narrate the events year by year.

On the whole, the progress of Great Britain during
the past ninety-six years has been towards what is
called 6 Democracy a long word meaning 6 Government
by the people \ This form of government may be said
to be still ' on its trial Let us hope that it will prove
a great success. It will only do so if all classes of the
people realize that they have duties as well as rights,
and if each class realizes that every other class has
rights as well as itself.

Five sovereigns have reigned and died during these
ninety-six years, and the sixth is now upon the throne.

George IV, William IV, Victoria 221

George III had long been blind and insane when he ninety-
died in 1820, and it was the eldest of his seven sons George^'
who became King in that year as George IV. This ^ 1820~
man had been acting as Prince Regent for his insane
father since 1810. He was naturally clever and had
some kind of selfish good nature, but he was mean,
cowardly, and an incredible liar. Some famous lies he
told so often that at last he got to believe them him-
self ; for instance, he was fond of saying that he had
been present at the battle of Waterloo, whereas he had
never seen a shot fired in his life.

He was succeeded in 1830 by a stupid honest old William
gentleman, his brother, William IV, who, as a young i830-7.
man, had been nicknamed ' Silly Billy *. There was no
harm in King William, but there was little active good,
and so the influence of the Crown, both upon private
and public life, was very slight when he died in 1837.
His heir was his niece Victoria, a girl of eighteen of
whom little was then known, but of whose goodness
and high spirit stories were already being told.

6 Who will be king, Mamma/ she said, when she was Victoria
twelve years old, 'when Uncle William dies?' 'You is37— ioji";
will be queen, my dear.' 1 Then I must be a very good
little girl now/ she replied. In this wonderful lady the her char-
spirit of all her greatest ancestors seemed to have tlcter*
revived, the burning English patriotism of the Tudors,
the Scottish heart of the Stuarts, the courage of
Edward III, the wisdom of Edward I, Henry II and
Alfred. And all were softened and beautified by
womanly love and tenderness. No sovereign ever so
unweariedly set herself to win the love of her people,
to be the servant of her people. And her people re-
warded her with a love that she had more than deserved.

222 Edward VII, George V

Her reign of sixty-three years will always be remem-
bered in history by her name ; it was the 1 Victorian
Age '. Her husband was her own cousin, the wise and
good Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a small
Edward State in central Germany. She was succeeded by her

VII 1901—

io. ' eldest son, Edward VII, whose too short reign closed
only after this book was begun. All the Empire is still
in mourning for him, the wise and prudent statesman,
the peace-lover, the peacemaker of Europe, the noble
English gentleman.

George V, The result of the reigns of Victoria and Edward VII

1910

has been to lift the Crown again to a position which it
had not occupied in men's minds since the death of
Elizabeth. It is not with our lips only that we are
loyal to King George V, it is with our hearts also. The
crown is not only the 'golden circle' that binds the
Empire together ; it is the greatest thing in that Empire.

The Bells and the Queen, 1911.

i Gay go up and gay go down
To ring the Bells of London Town.'
When London Town 's asleep in bed
You'll hear the Bells ring overhead,

In excelsis gloria /

Ringing for Victoria,
Ringing for their mighty mistress — ten years dead !

Here is more gain than Gloriana guessed,
Than Gloriana guessed or Indies bring —

Than golden Indies bring. A Queen confessed,
A Queen confessed that crowned her people King.

Her people King, and crowned all Kings above,

Above all Kings have crowned their Queen their
love —

Have crowned their love their Queen, their Queen their
love !

The Bells and the Queen 223

Denying her, we do ourselves deny,

Disowning her are we ourselves disowned.

Mirror was she of our fidelity,

And handmaid of our destiny enthroned ;

The very marrow of Youth's dream, and still

Yoke-mate of wisest Age that worked her will !

Our fathers had declared to us her praise.

Her praise the years had proven past all speech,
And past all speech our loyal hearts always,

Always our hearts lay open, each to each ;
Therefore men gave their treasure and their blood
To this one woman — for she understood !

Four o' the clod ! Now all the world is still.
Oh, London Bells, to all the world declare
The Secret of the Empire — read who will !
The Glory of the People — touch who dan !

The Bells :

Power that has reached itself all kingly powers,
St. Margarets : By love overpowered —
St. Martin's : By love o'erpowered —
St. Clement Danes : By love o'erpowered,

The greater power confers !

The Bells :

For we were hers, as she, as she was ours,
Bow Bells : And she was ours —
St Patd's : And she was ours —
Westminster : And she was ours,

As we, even we, were hers !

The Bells :

As we were hers !

224 The British Parliament

The
British
Parlia-
ment,
1815-1911.

The

House of
Lords.

The

House of
Commons.

Mistakes
of the
Tories,
1815-32.

The next greatest thing, probably every one will
admit, is the Parliament of the United Kingdom,
During these ninety-six years that Parliament has
undergone considerable changes. The House of Lords
has been very much increased in numbers, but has not
been altogether strengthened by this increase. It still
represents, as it has always represented, the wealthy
people of the kingdom. When the only wealth was in
land, the House of Lords consisted almost wholly of
great landowners. Now that the traders have more
wealth than the landowners, rich manufacturers and
other great employers of labour have been made peers,
though they also have nearly always bought land to
support their dignity.

The House of Commons has undergone a still greater
change. I told you in the last chapter what serious
need there was in the eighteenth century for a i Reform '
of that House, and how, during the twenty-two years of
the Great War, that and all other reforms had to be
put off. A very small knot of Whigs had never ceased
to urge that reform even during the war. The foremost
of these was Charles, Earl Grey.

I have had to scold the Whigs a good deal during
the reign of George III, and I am afraid I shall now
have to scold the Tories for their attitude during the
first fifteen of these ninety-six years. They held power
right up to 1830, and it was obviously their duty to
take up this and many other questions in a serious and
' modern' spirit. They consisted of two sections, the
enlightened Tories, like Mr. Canning and Sir Robert
Peel, who had sat at the feet of William Pitt ; and the
stick-in-the-mud Tories, like Lord Sidmouth and Lord
Eldon, who were opposed to any change in any depart-

The Reform Bill, 1832 225

ment of life. I think it was strange that the former as
well as the latter section of Tories were opposed to
reform of the House of Commons. The result was that The
it fell wholly to the Whigs to force it on ; and the ^
Whigs, being weak in Parliament, did not scruple to the^House
appeal to the passions of uneducated people outside mons,
Parliament. They encouraged 'monster meetings', 181°-32-
* monster petitions ' and such like. There were riots in
favour of Reform. At one riot at Manchester in 1819
the soldiers had to be called in, and several people
were shot. Very likely these were only innocent specta-
tors and not rioters at all ; those who get up riots are
usually careful to keep out of the way when their sup-
pression begins. Stiff laws were passed in Parliament
to prevent such riotous meetings for the future.

From 1820 to 1830 the question of Reform was never The

IX, 'form

for a moment allowed to slumber, and at last in 1832 Bin i83&
the Duke of Wellington, who, though opposed to Reform
himself, was always moderate and sensible, advised the
Tories to give way, and a ' Reform Bill p was at last got
through both Houses, an eminently sensible and moderate
Bill. The number of members in the House was not
increased, but the absurd old boroughs with few or no
inhabitants lost their right of sending members, and
the great growing towns got that right. All persons
in the counties with a moderate amount of property,
and all persons in the towns who had a house worth £10
a year, got votes for the election of members. The
educated people of Great Britain and Ireland were
very fairly represented in the House of Commons be-
tween 1832 and 1867.

But this did not stop agitation outside. A group of Fresh
men called ' Chartists ' began to cry out for something a6ltatl0n i

1134 p

226 The British Parliament

the

Chartists
1832-48.

Later
Reform
Bills,
1867 and
1885.

The Irish
members.

more, for the representation of the uneducated as well.
They demanded that every grown-up man should have
a vote, that members of Parliament should be paid,
that a new Parliament should be elected every year,
and so on. These men tried to get up riots in favour
of their demands ; in 1848 it looked as if these riots
were going to be serious. But the thing fizzled out
somehow. Twice since that time new 6 Reform Bills'
have been passed, one by each party in the State, by
the Tories in 1867 (now called c Conservatives') and by
the Whigs in 1885 (now called 6 Liberals' or Radicals').
On each occasion the vote was given to poorer and less
educated classes of the people, and on the latter occa-
sion the distinction between counties and boroughs was
practically abolished ; every district in Britain, whether
of town or country, is now represented in the House of
Commons pretty nearly according to the number of
people living in it.

Unfortunately one exception to this principle has
been allowed. With the exception of those from Ulster,
the Irish members of the House of Commons since the
Union of 1800 have never been loyal to our system of
government, but have continually cried out for a separate
Parliament in Dublin. The first great agitator for this
purpose was the orator Daniel O'Connell, in the reigns of
George IV and William IV and at the beginning of
Victoria's reign. He has been followed by many others,
notably by Mr. Parnell, and the agitation is still continu-
ing. In order to hush this cry, British statesmen have
allowed Ireland to have many more members of the House
of Commons than the population of that island warrants.
More than one statesman, especially the famous
Mr. Gladstone in 1885 and 1892, has thought of con-

Ministers of the Crown 227

ciliating the Irish, by granting them, under the name
of ' Home Rule the separate Parliament which they
demand. But most people fear that a separate Irish
Parliament would be followed by a complete separa-
tion between Ireland and Great Britain, bv the estab-
lishment of an Irish Republic, and by the oppression
of the wrell-to-do and intelligent classes of Irishmen,
who are certainly loyal to the British Crown. All
British politicians, on both sides, have, during the last
seventy years, made haste to remove every real, and,
indeed, every imaginary grievance of the Irish people,
though they have earned no gratitude by doing so.

As regards the Ministers of the Crown, whom we The
may consider next after Parliament as an 'institution' ^f1"}1^^3
of the country, it has been well understood, ever since down.
George Ills death, that the King ' reigns Hut does
not govern \ He takes as his ministers men who
are agreeable to the majority in the existing House of
Commons. In quiet times there is a new House of
Commons about every five or six years and there must
be one every seven years. There is, therefore, very
likely to be a change of ministry every time there is
a new House. Before the first Reform Bill there were
only about 300,000 electors ; there are now over
7,000,000. But, oddly enough, the larger the number
of electors, the more frequent are the changes of public
opinion. In former days Whigs or Tories might well
hold office through three or four successive Parliaments ;
now it is very rare that either party holds it through
two. The opinion of the electors has a curious habit
of swinging right round in a very short space of time ;
and, so, great changes in our rulers are of frequent
occurrence.

228 The British Parliament

The

Cabinet.

The

King's

advice.

Depart-
ments
of the
Govern-
ment.

These rulers or ministers we call the ' Cabinet ' ; and
in the Cabinet you will always find a 6 Prime Minister ',
generally called the 6 First Lord of the Treasury', at
the head of the whole thing ; it is with him that the
real responsibility lies. He explains to the King what
he and his friends think ought to be done ; and, when
he is a wise man, he generally finds that the King's
advice on the matter is very well worth listening to.
If the King does not approve of what his Prime Minis-
ter suggests he can always dismiss him ; but it is of
no use his doing this unless he can appoint some one
else whom the existing House of Commons will follow,
or unless he is prepared to dismiss the existing House
of Commons and call a new Parliament. The King will
do this last if he feels sure that the minister and the
existing House are leading the nation astray or are
leading it where it doesn't want to go. Any very
' revolutionary ' proposal, such as the abolition of either
House of Parliament, the surrender of India or the
Colonies, the reduction of the Navy very far below the
strength necessary to defend the Empire, might quite
conceivably obtain for a moment a majority in the
House of Commons, and, though it is unlikely, it is
just possible that the House of Lords might be terrified
into accepting it. But then it would be the duty of the
King to interfere, and to dismiss, at all costs, the
ministry which was rash enough to make such a pro-
posal.

Besides the Prime Minister, the most important mem-
bers of the Cabinet are the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
who manages money matters, the Secretaries of State
for War, for Foreign Affairs, for the Colonies, for Home
Affairs, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, who

Distinguished Prime Ministers 229

manages the Navy. Each is responsible for some par-
ticular part of the task of government ; but all must
agree upon all important questions, and the minister
who doesn't a#ree with the rest of the Cabinet must

resign.

I shall not trouble you with a list of the ministries The most

distill

that have held office since 1815 ; two things only you guished
should remember : first, that ministries are more short- FTr.imti

JVlinisters

lived now than they used to be ; and secondly, that they since 1815
are more dominated by the Prime Minister for the time
being than they used to be. The most distinguished
Prime Ministers have been Mr. Canning (died 1827),
Lord Grey (died 1845), Sir Robert Peel (died 1850),
Lord Palmerston (died 1865), Lord Beaconsfield, better
known as Mr. Disraeli (died 1881), Mr. Gladstone
(died 1898), and Lord Salisbury (died 1903). Each in
his own way has contributed something to the greatness
of England ; but each, with the exception of Sir Robert
Peel, has had a weak side. Speaking generally, those
ministers avIio have paid most attention to finances and
to internal reform have been less successful in upholding
the honour of England abroad and in strengthening the
army and navy.

With regard to the law and the law courts, it is not The Law
such a very different England in which we live from Courte«
what it was in the days of our great-grandfathers. The
House of Lords is still the highest 6 Court of Appeal * in
Great Britain and Ireland ; but to hear appeals, only
those peers sit who are specially appointed to be judges
for that purpose. There is a Court of Appeal below it
and a High Court of Justice below that. The judges
are still appointed by the King, and still 1 go on circuit '
four times a year to the several districts of England to

230 Reform of the Criminal Law

try criminal Cases, as they have done since the fourteenth
century. There are also small courts called ' county
courts', for small lawsuits, in some sixty different dis-
tricts in England. Scotland has kept, since the Union
of 1707, her own system of law and law courts entirely
different from ours, but from them also you can appeal
to the House of Lords. Ireland has the same system of
law as ours, but has her own law courts with appeal to
the House of Lords. Each colony in the Empire has
its own law courts and judges, and appeals from them
and from the Indian law courts come not to the House
of Lords, but to a few great judges in the Privy Council.

The one really great law reform has been that of the
criminal law. In 1815 over one hundred and sixty
crimes were still supposed to be punished with death.
There are now only two, high treason and wilful murder,
and, unfortunately, people who commit high treason
are now too often let off. In 1815 a thief might
be hanged if he stole five shillings' worth of goods
from a shop! He hardly ever was hanged, because
he was tried by a jury and a judge, and juries preferred
to declare him ' not guilty ' rather than allow him to be
hanged ; so, as a rule, he got off altogether. Even of
those who were convicted and condemned to be hanged,
not one-tenth were hanged. And this was because public
opinion was more merciful than the law. From 1788
onwards criminals who had just escaped hanging used
to be 6 transported ' to Australia, and this went on till
1840. The other settlers in that continent naturally
objected very much to this ; and we now send our
criminals to penal servitude ' in large prisons at Dart-
moor and Portland instead. No words can be too hard
to use against the Tory ministers like Lord Eldon,

Removal of Disabilities 231

who, year after year, from 1815 to 1S30 obstructed the
reform of the criminal laws as much as they could ;
most of the reforms in them were due to the Whigs or
to the more enlightened Tory Sir Robert Peel.

To Tory Governments belongs the credit of beginning Admis-
to remove the laws which made a man's admission to |)^of
Parliament depend upon his religious opinions. Both ^f.^j^^g
Lord Castlereagh, who died in 1822, and Mr. Canning, andJews
who died in 1827, had always been anxious to admit J?e?Jf
Catholics to Parliament ; but it was just after Canning's 1828-53.
death that, first the Protestant Dissenters in l s2s, and
then the Catholics in 1829, were admitted. Jews had
to wait till 1853, and those who openly declared their
disbelief in any religion at all till 1884. The support
of the State to the Protestant Church in Ireland, which
dated from the time of Elizabeth, was taken away in
18G8. The zeal of the Church of England was, from Church
1829 onwards, quickened by men like Newman and i^o<j.a'
Dr. Pusey, and religion is now a far more vital force
in our daily lives than it was at the end of George Ill s
reign. Differences of opinion upon religion still exist,
and still occasionally lead to squabbles between
Churchmen and Dissenters, but they are being smoothed
away; of all passions religious hatred is now seen to
be the most odious, and all reasonable men acknowledge
that the teaching of sound morality is the main duty of
all religious bodies. Without religion there can be no
good morals, and without good morals the wisest laws
are futile.

The Whigs are responsible for the abolition of slavery other
in our West Indian Islands (1833) ; the importation of leforms-
slaves from Africa thither had been prohibited as far
back as 1807. They can also claim the credit of the

232 Municipal and Educational Reform

The new
Poor Law,
1834.

Municipal

reform,

1835.

County

Councils,

1889.

National
Educa-
tion, 1870.

The food
question.

'New Poor Law' (1834), which refused to give food or
money to the idle and improvident unless they would
come into the ' Workhouse ' ; and this law made work-
house life sufficiently unpleasant, so that lots of idle
loafers, who had hitherto ■ lived on the rates ', preferred
to earn their own living. The same Whig Government
in 1835 reformed the town councils of our cities and
boroughs in such a way that every householder now
gets a vote for the election of his town council. In
1889 a Conservative Government extended this plan to
the country districts also, and in each shire a 6 county
council' is now elected, which manages all local busi-
ness such as the keeping up of roads, bridges, lunatic
asylums, and the police. It was Sir Robert Peel who
created the present magnificent force of policemen, and
its members are still sometimes, in sport, called after
him 6 bobbies ' and ' peelers.'

Perhaps the most important of all reforms of the
nineteenth century was the introduction in 1870 for all
classes of the people of a system of schools, supported
by the State and paid for by a rate on each district.
Every one is now compelled to attend some kind of
school, and a man may be sent to prison if he refuses to
send his children to school. When I was a boy it was
quite common to meet people who could neither read
nor write ; now it is the rarest thing in the world.

There was one burning question all through the first
thirty years of this period, of which I have yet told you
nothing ; and it was the most serious of all — the ques-
tion of food. Great Britain and Ireland could no longer
grow enough corn to feed their great and rapidly in-
creasing populations. For the two-and-twent}r years
which ended in 1815, Governments had been too busy

The Corn Laws

saving the very existence of Britain and of Europe to
pay attention to this question. But now followed a
period of peace, in which both the bill for the war
had to be paid, and this terrible food question faced
in earnest.

The bill for the war was an enormous one ; in 1793 The
the National Debt was not much over 200 millions ; in Dei,t 1 1
1815 it was over 900 millions; the interest to be paid from 1815.
on it annually had gone up from 8 to 33 millions.
Taxation had been enormously heavy, and every one
cried out for its reduction. To this cry for a reduction
of taxes the Government was perhaps right to turn
a deaf ear as long as that frightful bill remained
unpaid ; and, alas, during these ninety-six years, very
little of that bill has really been paid off; the Debt is
still over 700 millions, though the interest annually
paid on each£l00 of it has been reduced to £2 10s. 0<l.

But there can be no excuse for the deaf ear whic h the The Corn
Government turned to the question of food. The price f^S*
of corn still varied with each harvest, and varied enor-
mously. But now it was beginning to be possible to
import corn from America, from Russia and from several
other places. And the proper thing to do would have
been to put a moderate Customs' duty on the impor-
tation of corn, a duty which should vary with the price
of corn in the London market. Instead of doing this,
Parliament in 1815 passed a law saying that no corn
should be imported at all until the price in London was
at 80s. a quarter, which meant that a loaf of bread
would cost about 9c/. This was called ' protecting ' the
British farmers and the British landowners, who of
course could get high prices and high rents when the
price of corn was high ; but it came very near to mean

234 Repeal of the Corn Laws

starving the British labourer. Those who upheld this
plan were called ■ Protectionists ' ; those who wished to
admit cheap foreign corn were called ' Free Traders \

The ' Corn Laws ' became the subject of an agitation
far fiercer than that for Reform of Parliament, and with
much more reason. Over and over again there was
danger of a rising of the poor labourers against all who
owned or farmed land. Even when there was not a bad
harvest, and when the price of corn was far below the
80s. a quarter, it was easy for agitators to persuade the
poor that they must be very badly off ; and, especially
in the days before the Reform Bill, the outcry of the
poor against the rich was a most distressing feature of
the age. You cannot expect much reason from people
who are really hard up for food, or who expect to be
hard up for food in a few months. At last, in 1845,
there appeared the most manifest symptoms of a coming
famine in Ireland, owing to the failure of the potato
crop. Sir Robert Peel, who was then in power, and
who had hitherto been a moderate ' Protectionist
turned right round, and in 1846 abolished the Corn
Laws altogether. He was too late to save Ireland from
famine, which came in all its horrors in 1847, and, by
death or emigration to America, reduced the Irish
people by more than a third of their numbers. But
he believed that he had saved any portion of our islands
from the chance of such a disaster for the future.

For a long time after the abolition of the Corn Law s,
it still paid the farmers to grow corn in Britain. But as
the empty lands of America and Canada came to be
more and more peopled and cultivated, and when the
introduction of steamships brought down the cost and
shortened the time needed to bring corn across the

Imported Food 235

Atlantic, it began to pay them less and less. And now
we buy not only almost all our corn, but most of our
meat, and a good deal of our wool, fruit and butter,
from abroad also. The sad result has been that the
land of England is rapidly going out of cultivation, and
that our villages are being deserted in favour of our
towns, where Ave cannot expect so strong and healthy
a race to grow up as that of our grandfathers who lived
by work in the open fields.

There is, moreover, a most serious danger behind. If Imported
England should ever be defeated in a great war at sea,
it would be impossible for us to get our food at all, and
our population would simply starve. Therefore, at what-
ever cost to ourselves, it is our duty to keep our navy
so strong that it must be for ever impossible for us to be
defeated at sea.

Big Steamers.

6 Oh, where are you going to, all you Big Steamers,
With England's own coal, up and down the salt seas?'

' We are going to fetch you your bread and your butter,
Your beef, pork, and mutton, eggs, apples, and cheese.1

c And where will you fetch it from, all you Big Steamers,
And where shall I write you when you are away V

'We fetch it from Melbourne, Quebec, and Vancouver,
Address us at Hobart, Hong kong, and Bombay.'

'But if anything happened to all you Big Steamers,
And suppose you were wrecked up and down the salt
sea?'

'Why, you'd have no coffee or bacon for breakfast,
And you'd have no muffins or toast for your tea/

1 Then I'll pray for fine weather for all you Big Steamers,

For little blue billows and breezes so soft.'
' Oh, billows and breezes don't bother Big Steamers,

For w e're iron below and steel-rigging aloft.'

236

Free Trade

' Then I'll build a new lighthouse for all you Big Steamers,
With plenty wise pilots to pilot you through/

' Oh, the Channel 's as bright as a ball-room already,
And pilots are thicker than pilchards at Looe.'

' Then what can I do for you, all you Big Steamers,
Oh, what can I do for your comfort and good ? '

* Send out your big warships to watch your big waters,
That no one may stop us from bringing you food.

' For the bread that you eat and the biscuits you nibble,
The sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve,

They are brought to you daily by all us Big Steamers,
And if any one hinders our coming you 11 starve!'

The principle of 'free trade' has been carried into
all departments of life. When Sir Robert Peel took
office in 1841 there were over twelve hundred articles
on which duty had to be paid when they were imported
from abroad. There are now only sixteen such articles,
and the only ones of any importance are wine, spirits
and tobacco (all of which are 'luxuries', as opposed
to ' necessaries ' of life). When this policy was first
adopted it was expected that all other nations would
soon adopt ' free trade ' also, but they have not done
so ; and we have even allowed our own colonies to put
on Customs' duties against the importation of British
goods to their ports. Proposals are now on foot, and
are maintained by a large party in Britain, to go back
upon this principle of ' free trade ', and to impose
a moderate 'tariff' on the importation of goods from
all nations which will not admit British goods to their
ports without a duty. It is not my business to express
an opinion as to whether this would be wise or not.
No doubt 'free trade all round' would be the most

The Dominion of Canada 237

splendid thing in the world for all nations if all would
agree to carry it out.

The next point to which I must direct your attention Growth
is the growth of the British Empire. Soon after Empire.
Victoria became Queen a cry for ' self-government '
began to be heard from the Colonies. There were five-
and-forty British Colonies all told, and the joke went
round that they were governed by three-and-twenty
clerks of the ' Colonial Office ' in Downing Street
London. This was not quite true, as most of our Cry of
colonies had little councils of their own, which in some for^elf-
cases were even elected. It was in Canada that the govern-
cry for a more free system first arose. Many of the Canada,
inhabitants of its two provinces were of old French 18'*9,
descent, and spoke, as they still speak, French. These
had been nobly loyal to Britain and had twice repelled
American invasions ; and there were also descendants
of American loyalists, who had fled to Canada in 1776-83
rather than live under a foreign flag. But there was
a danger of such feeling wearing out, and there were,
in 1840, mutterings of rebellion and threats that the
Canadians would join the United States. In order to
prevent this and to satisfy the Canadians, the experi-
ment was tried of giving them the beginnings of a
regular Parliament like our own, with a ministry respon-
sible to that Parliament and named by a Governor
representing the Crown.

The gradual extension of the Dominion of Canada to Extension
include the territories known as Ontario and British ?f ,

Canada,

Columbia right up to the island of Vancouver, was the 1S40-1911.
work of the middle period of Victorias reign ; and
during the same period the United States of America
were extending Westwards and ever more Westwards

238 Australian Federation

till they reached the Pacific Ocean. In 6 British North
America Newfoundland now alone remains a Colony
separated from the ' Dominion of Canada ' and with a
Parliament of its own.
The The first of the Australian Colonies in point of time

lian was New South Wales, to which, as I told you, our
P^J^nf'i criminals continued to be sent from 1788 till 1840 :

1787-1911. 5

West Australia dates from 1829, South Australia
and Victoria from 1836, and Queensland from 1859.
These all soon began to cry out for parliamentary
government of their owrn ; and in 1850 a Whig ministry
The began to give it to them freely. Quite in our own
Han Fecle- days an Act of the British Parliament has made all
ration. the Australian Colonies into a single ' Federation' of
States, with a ' federal ' or united Parliament for the
whole continent. New Zealand, which was first re-
cognized as a colony in 1840, has got her own Parlia-
ment and is not included in this Federation. The
great wealth of both New Zealand and Australia con-
sists in their vast flocks of sheep ; these colonies are to
the British manufacturers of woollen goods what England
was to the Flemish weavers in the fourteenth century,
namely, the source of the ' raw material ' of their in-
dustry. There are also great gold mines in Australia.
South Next in order of importance of our colonies comes

f/™' „ South Africa with its wonderful climate. Its great

180o- 1911. # # °

importance to us, when we took it from the Dutch
in the Great War, was as a station on the road to
India ; but, since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869,
we have now got a shorter road thither.

In Canada we had really little difficulty in making
good friends with our new French subjects, for they
hated and feared the pushing Americans, whose

South African Federation 239

territory lay to the South, and they knew that we
would defend them against these men. In Australia
we had nothing but a few miserable blacks, who could
hardly use even bows and arrows in fight. In New
Zealand we had a more warlike branch of the same
race, called the Maoris, to deal with. But in South
Africa we had not only really fierce savages like
Zulus and Kaffirs, but also a large population of Dutch
farmers and traders, who had been settled there since
the middle of the seventeenth century*

These were called the ' Boers ' ; they thoroughly The
disliked our rule, and they were continually retiring Boers
farther and farther from Capetown into the interior of
the continent. They treated the native Kaffirs very
badly, and objected when we tried to protect these
against them. Besides 'Cape Colony (at the Cape of
Good Hope itself), there were Dutch or half-Dutch States
at Natal, on the Orange River, and beyond the Yaal
River. One by one, in the reign of Victoria, each of
these Avas annexed by Great Britain, and the last years
of our great Queen were made sorrowful by the war
which we had to fight against these brave, dogged and
cunning Dutch farmers of. the Transvaal. This war,
though against a mere handful of men, strained the
resources of Great Britain to the utmost ; it showed us
how very badly equipped we were for war upon any
serious scale ; but it also led to a great outburst of
patriotism all over the Empire, and our other colonies
sent hundreds of their best young men to help us. In Tin
the end we won, and peace was signed in 1902 ; a ?Scm
1 Federation ' of all the South African colonies with Federa-
a central Parliament at Capetown has recently been tlon*
concluded, and the hatred between British and Dutch

240

The West Indies

is now almost a thing of the past. South Africa owes
its recent prosperity more to the discovery of great
gold and diamond mines than to agriculture ; but
almost anything can be grown there.

The vast territory of Rhodesia, in the centre of the
dark continent of Africa, and the British 1 Protector-
ates' of Uganda, British East Africa and British
Central Africa farther to the North, are still, as yet,
more or less undeveloped ; but great things may be
expected of all of them, both as agricultural, com-
mercial and mining colonies. The natives everywhere
welcome the mercy and justice of our rule, and they
are no longer liable, as they were before we came, to be
carried off as slaves by Arab slave-dealers.

There are other countries, like Ceylon, the West
Indies, the several stations on the North-west African
coast, Singapore on the Straits of Malacca, Guiana on
the north coast of South America, and islands too
numerous to mention, both in the Pacific and Atlantic
Oceans, which belong to Great Britain. But most
of these are called ' Crown Colonies ' and do not enjoy
any form of Parliamentary government nor need it.
The prosperity of the West Indies, once our richest
possession, has very largely declined since slavery was
abolished in 1833. There is little market for their chief
products, and yet a large population, mainly black,
descended from slaves imported in previous centuries,
or of mixed black and white race ; lazy, vicious and
incapable of any serious improvement, or of work
except under compulsion. In such a climate a few
bananas will sustain the life of a negro quite
sufficiently ; why should he work to get more than this?
He is quite happy and quite useless, and spends any
extra wages which he may earn upon finery.

The Indian Empire 241

What the future of our self-governing and really Future
great Colonies may be, it is hard to say. Perhaps the Empire
best thing that could happen would be a ' Federation '
of the whole British Empire, with a central Parliament
in which all the Colonies should get representatives,
with perfect free trade between the whole, and with an
Imperial Army and Navy to which all should contribute
payments. But where and when shall we find the
statesman great and bold enough to propose it ?

Our Indian Empire must be treated to a few lines by Our
itself. It is not a Colony but a ' Dependency of the Exiipire i
Crown'. The extension of our rule over the whole
Indian peninsula was made possible, first by the ex-
clusion of any other European power (when we had
once beaten off the French there), and secondly by the
fact that the weaker states and princes continually
called in our help against the stronger. From our
three starting-points of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay,
we have gradually swallowed the whole country ;
though some states keep their native princes, these
are all sworn dependants of King George as 4 Emperor
of India', just as in feudal times a great feudal earl
was a sworn subject of his king. Our rule has been
infinitely to the good of all the three hundred million^
of the different races who inhabit that richly peopled
land.

Until 1858 the old 'East India Company ', founded at its growth
the end of Elizabeth's reign, was the nominal sovereign. tl]1 191L
Its early conquests had been made over the unwarlike
races of Bengal and of the South ; next, in the reign
of George III, over the gallant robbers who swarmed
over the central plains and were called Mahrattas.
Early in Victoria's time we had to meet those magni-

1134 Q

242 The Indian Mutiny

ficent fighters the Sikhs of the Punjaub, and the fierce
Afghans of the north-western mountains. Both gave
us from time to time terrible lessons ; but British
patience and courage triumphed over all. As we con-
quered them, so we enrolled in our Indian army all the
best fighting men of these various races ; of that army
the Sikhs are now the backbone ; but the Afghans have
still to be kept at bay beyond the northern mountains.
They are the ' tigers from the North ' ; and, if our
rule were for a moment taken away, they would sweep
down and slav and enslave all the defenceless dwellers
on the plains.

The In 1857 our carelessness and mismanagement of this

Mutiny, vast Empire, together with the religious fear inspired
1857. among the Indians by the introduction of European
inventions such as steam and railways, brought about
the most serious danger that ever threatened British
India, a mutiny in our Indian army. The instigator of
the revolt was a man who claimed to be the representa-
tive of the old Mahratta rulers ; the rebels took Delhi,
the oldest capital city of India, and set up a shadow of
an Emperor. They perpetrated terrible cruelties upon
defenceless English women and children. But Southern
India remained perfectly loyal and quiet ; so did several
of the old native princes ; while the gallant Sikhs and
the Ghoorkas of Nepaul came to our help in crowds.
British troops were poured in as fast as possible,
though in those days that was not very fast. The siege
of Delhi and the relief of Lucknow were the greatest
leats that were performed ; and the names of John
Lawrence, John Nicholson, Colin Campbell and Henry
Havelock became for ever immortal. When the Mutiny
was finally put down in 1858 the Crown took over the

Egypt

sovereignty from the East India Company, which
ceased to exist ; and, twenty years later, Queen Victoria
was proclaimed 'Empress of India'.

Another ' Eastern ' state, much nearer home, came to Egypt,
us in 1882, Egypt. It was sorely against the will of 18S-"1J
our statesmen that it came. Egypt had, till 1840, been
a province of the Turkish Empire, and had since that
date been most shockingly misgoverned by a series
of Mohammedan rulers, called Khedives. When, in
1869, the Canal was cut by French engineers through
the Isthmus of Suez, which separates the Red Sea from
the Mediterranean, and when a new route to India for
the largest vessels was thus opened, it became of the
first importance to us to keep this route safe and open.
France at first shared with us the ' Protectorate ' of
Egypt which was then rendered necessary ; but, when
an insurrection of natives broke out in 1882, the task
of suppressing it fell to us alone, and, when it was over,
the sole Protectorate of Egypt became ours also.
These were comparatively easy tasks, for the native
Egyptian was not a good fighting man ; but, as in
India there is always a 6 tiger from the North ' to be
feared, so in Egypt there was always a * lion from the
South'. By this 'lion' I mean the fierce tribes of the
desert which is called the 'Soudan', and of the Upper
Nile Valley ; they are Mohammedans by faith and of
mixed Arab and negro race. These wild men were
always ready to spring upon the fertile valley of the
Lower Nile. Our ministers at home too often turned a
blind eye to these dangers, and their blindness cost
us the life of the gallant general, Charles Gordon. It
was not till 1898 that these ' Soudanese' were finally
subdued ; and the Soudan is now governed by us as

Q 2

244

Trade Rivalry

Jealousy
of other
European
States.

Trade
rivalry.

Necessity
for de-
fence of
the

Empire.

a dependency of Egypt. The justice and mercy, which
these countries had not known since the fall of the
Roman Empire, is now in full measure given to them
by the British.

This great expansion of the British Empire during
the last ninety-six years has not come about without a
great deal of jealousy from the other European powers ;
and this jealousy was never more real or more danger-
ous than it is to-day. But the one European war
which we have fought since 1815 had nothing to do
with the expansion of our Empire.

The other nations have realized that this Empire was
founded on trade, that it has to be maintained by a
navy, and that it has resulted in good government of
the races subject to us. So, though they have envied
us and given us ugly names, they have, on the whole,
paid us the compliment by trying to copy us, to build
up their navies, to increase their manufactures, to plant
colonies and to govern subject races well. Some people
think that they have not succeeded in this last object
so well as ourselves. But all European nations are
now keenly interested in trade rivalry ; whether this
will end peaceably or not, remains still to be seen.

All civilized nations, except ourselves and the
Americans, have also set themselves to arm and drill
all their citizens, so as to fit themselves for war on
a gigantic scale at any moment. If ever a great war
breaks out in Europe, the nation that is most ready with
its fleet and its army will win ; in the greatest war of
the nineteenth century (that of 1870 between France
and Germany) it needed only a telegram of two words to
put the German army in motion in a few hours. On
the other hand all the great mechanical inventions

The Crimean War 245

of recent years, railways, telegraphs, enormous guns,
iron ships, airships, have made war, not only much
more terrible, but infinitely more expensive ; and, so,
each nation will naturally shrink from being the first
to start a war, for defeat will spell absolute and irre-
trievable ruin. But I don't think there can be any
doubt that the only safe thing for all of us who love
our country is to learn soldiering at once, and to be
prepared to fight at any moment.

The one European war which we fought in the nine- The
teenth century Avas the 'Crimean War \ England and \y!™a
France fought Russia, on behalf of Turkey, in 1854-6. 1854H*.
The Turkish State was believed to be crumbling, and
certainly the Turks were real barbarians, who governed
their provinces very badly ; and, being Mohammedans,
they denied all justice to their Christian subjects.
Russia claimed to protect these subjects, but every one
knew that she only did this in order to swallow as much
of the Turkish Empire as she could. All other powers
dreaded Russia, a half-barbarous state of vast size, and
full of very brave, if very stupid soldiers. Some
people think that the cunning Frenchmen led England
by the nose into this Avar, and that it was no business
of ours. It was fought in the peninsula of the Crimea,
on the northern coast of the Black Sea. There were
some terrible battles, those of the Alma, of Balaclava, of
Inkermann, in the autumn of 1854 ; then the war settled
into a long siege of Sebastopol, during an awful winter,
in which the sufferings of our army in the trenches before
the city were terrible. In the end Russia had to own
herself beaten, and Turkey, whom people called the
c Sick Man of Europe ', was propped up again. Though
many of his other provinces have revolted from him, he

246 Changes in English Life

is still alive, and now even in a fair way to recover his
health, and to govern more decently than before.
Changes One point I have left till the last. When your great-
life^lil- grandfathers were young, the fastest method of travelling
1911; the was in a stage-coach with four horses at ten miles an

age oi (

inven- hour, or in a private (and very expensive) post-ohaise
tions. which might perhaps do twelve miles an hour. When
they wanted to light their candles and fires (and they had
nothing else to light) they had to strike a spark with a
bit of steel on a bit of flint. The navy was built of oak
instead of steel, and moved by sails instead of steam.
Letters cost twopence apiece for the smallest weight
and the smallest distance ; a single-sheet letter from
London to Edinburgh cost Is. Id.

Look round you and see in what a different England
you now live. Gas was first used in the streets of
London in 1812 ; but gas already is going, and electric
light is taking its place. The first railway was opened
in 1829 between Liverpool and Manchester ; already
people are wondering when the first service of passenger
airships will begin to cut out railways for long journeys,
as electric tramways and motor-cars have begun to cut
out horses and railways alike for short ones. The first
steamship began to ply on the Clyde in 1812 ; it was of
three horse-power and moved at five miles an hour ;
the Mauretania, of 78,000 horse-power, now crosses the
Atlantic in less than five days. During the Great War
a system of wooden signals from hill-top to hill-top,
worked by hand, would carry a message from Dover to
London in about an hour ; now the electric telegraph
flashes messages round the world in a few minutes. By
another kind of wire, the telephone, a man in London
can talk to a man in Paris, and they can hear each

The Secret of the Machines 247

others voices and laughter. The discovery of chloroform
in 1847 has reduced human suffering to a degree which
we can hardly conceive ; and the other improvements in
medicine and surgery have saved and prolonged count-
less useful, as well as many useless, lives.

The Secret of the Machines.

We were taken from the ore-bed and the mine,

We were melted in the furnace and the pit —
We were cast and wrought and hammered to design,

We were cut and filed and tooled and gauged to fit.
Some water, coal, and oil is all we ask,

And a thousandth of an inch to give us play,
And now if you will set us to our task,

We will serve you four and twenty hours a day !

We can pull and haul and push and lift and drive.
We can print and plough and weave and heat and

light,

We can run and jump and swim and fly and dive,
We can see and hear and count and read and write !

Would you call a friend from half across the world ?

If you'll let us have his name and town and state,
You shall see and hear your crackling question hurled

Across the arch of heaven while you wait.
Has he answered? Does he need you at his side?

You can start this very evening if you choose,
And take the Western Ocean in the stride

Of thirty thousand horses and some screws !

The boat-express is waiting your command !
You will find the Mauretania at the quay.
Till her captain turns the lever 'neath his hand,
And the monstrous nine-decked city goes to sea.

Wireless
tele-
graphs.

Marine
engines.

248 The Secret of the Machines

Loco-
motives ,
pumps
and
mining
tools

All to-
gether.

Do you wish to make the mountains bare their head

And lay their new-cut forests at your feet ? ;
Do you want to turn a river in its bed,

And plant a barren wilderness with wheat ?
Shall we pipe aloft and bring you water down

From the never-failing cisterns of the snows,
To work the mills and tramways in your town,

And irrigate your orchards as it flows ?

It is easy ! Give us dynamite and drills !
Watch the iron-shouldered rocks lie down and
quake

As the thirsty desert-level floods and fills,

And the valley we have dammed becomes a lake !

But remember, please, the Law by which we live,

We are not built to comprehend a lie,
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive,

If you make a slip in handling us you die !
We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings —

Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods ! —
Our touch can alter all created things,

We are everything on earth — except The Gods !

Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from
your eyes,

It will vanish and the stars ivill shine again,
Because, for all our power and weight and size,
We are nothing more than children of your brain!

What is
the lesson
of history ?

In the common sense of the word ' happy ', these and
a thousand other inventions have no doubt made us
happier than our great-grandfathers wrere. Have they
made us better, braver, more self-denying, more manly
men and boys, more tender, more affectionate, more
home-loving women and girls ? It is for you boys and
girls, who are growing up, to resolve that you will be
all these things, and to be true to your resolutions.

249

The Glory of the Garden.

Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by ;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the
eye.

For where the old thick laurels grow, along the thin red
wall,

You'll find the tool- and potting-sheds which are the heart
of all,

The cold-frames and the hot-houses, the dungpits and
the tanks,

The rollers, carts and drain pipes, with the barrows and
the planks.

And there you'll see the gardeners, the men and 'pren-
tice boys

Told oft* to do as they are bid and do it without noise ;
For, except when seeds are planted and we shout to sc are
the birds,

The Glory of the Garden it abideth not in words.

And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose,
And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows ;
But they can roll and trim the lawns and sift the sand
and loam,

For the Glory of the Garden occupieth all who come.

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing : — ' Oh, how beautiful,' and sitting in the
shade,

While better men than we go out and start their working
lives

At grubbing weeds from gravel-paths with broken dinner-
knives.

250 The Glory of the Garden

*/

There 's not a pair of legs so thin, there 's not a head so
thick,

There 's not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart
so sick,

But it can find some needful job that 's crying to be
done,

For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till

further orders,
If it's only netting strawberries or killing slugs on

borders ;

And when your back stops aching and your hands begin
to harden,

You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the
Garden.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands
and pray

For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away !
And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!

Oxford : Horace Hart, Printer to the University

GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE

A R C T I

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Barbados

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Antipodes I. .

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Umery Walker «c.